I want to talk about a huge number: 457,000. That’s the number of construction jobs that have been lost since the sector peaked in September of 2006.
What’s interesting to me about this number is that at the beginning of the downturn in housing we didn’t see a huge drop in construction jobs, primarily because workers moved from residential into commercial.
Now that commercial is slowing as well, construction workers are falling out of jobs like flies. And they’re not the only ones. Big surprise furniture manufacturing jobs are falling as well. Domain furniture, a fave of mine, recently went out of business.
Anything related to housing right now appears to be toxic. I even read an article in the Washington Post about how garden centers are doing all they can to get people to spend money on the stuff around their homes. Discounts are big, so get thee to the nursery soon!
But getting back to the jobs number. Nearly half a million jobs gone from one sector alone, and yet you don’t hear so much about jobs in all the talk from lawmakers and policy-makers. It’s all about homeowners/borrowers and bailouts. I wonder if we’re not missing something here.
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