Dive Brief:

• The U.S. economy has been creating jobs, albeit slowly, since the economic recovery began, but construction simply is not back to playing the role it did before the housing crisis.
• The overall economy has returned to the number of jobs it had when the recession disrupted everything, but that means that construction jobs have been replaced by others.
• Another way to look at the effect of not having construction jobs come back is to look at hours worked: In December 2006, construction workers logged a seasonally adjusted 295.87 million hours, and in May 2014 it was 233.56 million hours.

Dive Insight:

Saying that the U.S. replaced all the jobs lost in the recession when employers added 217,000 spots last month tells a story of arithmetic, but little else. Construction jobs, especially home-building jobs, remain low compared to the pre-recession peak.