May jobs report shows strong demand for construction workers

The May jobs report shows the U.S. added 192,000 construction jobs. Yahoo Finance's Dani Romero explains where the construction hiring is.

Video Transcript

SEANA SMITH: Well, the May jobs report showing construction employment jumped in May with the industry adding 25,000 workers. Yahoo Finance's Dani Romero looking into this. And Danny, this is a sector that has really been struggling to find the workers that it needs.

DANI ROMERO: Yeah. So construction jobs aren't going anywhere. There's still this really strong demand to hire construction workers, specifically on the residential building side of things. About 2,400 jobs were added for residential building in May, so really signaling that manual labor is here to stay. Homebuilders have struggled to attract talent, retain these workers. So it really suggests they're likely not going to get rid of these workers, even under a weaker housing market.

Plus, employers have also scaled back some of those job listings specifically for construction compared to a year ago. So homebuilders are really focused right now on finishing up those homes that are under construction and then starting new ones. We've kind of seen that in the data.

Also the US still has a record number of homes under construction, so that adds a little bit of leverage to this picture right now for construction workers. If we take a look at the average hourly earnings, construction workers are currently making about $36 and change. That's about 5% higher than it was a year ago.

But the industry still faces major headwinds ahead. There's still a lack of labor candidates. I spoke to quite a few developers that say that they are having a really hard time finding candidates. Sometimes it takes them six weeks to three months to find one candidate. And so that prolongs also the onboarding process as well.

DANI ROMERO: And also potentially then prolongs the inventory issue that we do have in the housing market today. Dani Romero, thanks so much.