Dive summary:

• Within the last employment report before the presidential election is information that the construction industry added 17,000 people to payrolls between the end of September and the end of October, but that has produced little cheering.
• Ken Simonson, chief economist for Associated General Contractors of America, pronounced the bigger picture in the industry "essentially unchanged from a year ago." The industry's peak employment was in 2006, when 7.7 million people – 2.2 million more than now – were on job sites or in construction  company offices.
• The industry's unemployment rate went down to 11.4%, but one argument is that the drop is attributable to people giving up on finding work in construction and moving to other fields, not to a bigger percentage of the same workforce being back on the job.

From the article:

Construction employers added 17,000 jobs in October while the industry’s unemployment rate fell to 11.4 percent, according to an analysis of new federal data released today by the Associated General Contractors of America. ...