Dive Brief:

• Members of Associated General Contractors say they are having to look high and low for the workers they need, with almost 75% reporting in an August survey that they are having problems in that regard.
• Federal data, however, show there should be workers available, with 48 of 50 states not even within 5% of their pre-recession high employment levels.
• The construction unemployment rate has been falling, but hiring is not rising fast enough to account for that change, so the hiring difficulties may be because of how many workers have simply given up and stopped trying to come back.

Dive Insight:

All the statistics reported at a national level have the inherent flaw of missing local variations. There's no way they cannot. But as with difficulties in finding skilled workers, so many of the data on the recovery of construction seem to hide very wide variations locally or regionally.