There have been job gains in March
The Kwest Group, an Ohio Construction Company, is Adding More Construction Jobs in the Next Six Months: Project Opportunities for Employees with Military Veterans
In March, the Labor Department reported that construction firms created 39,000 jobs, in spite of high interest rates. Hiring was also robust in health care, restaurants and local government. The unemployment rate dropped even as a lot of people joined the workforce.
The ABC’s most recent Construction Confidence Index found nearly 48% of builders expect to add jobs in the next six months, while only about 11% expect job cuts.
Ryan Odendahl, the CEO of Kwest Group, a civil and industrial construction firm based in Ohio, said that they are seeing more project opportunities for their employees. We’re doing everything from a large road construction project to a bike path.
Kwest has over 300 employees and is looking to add more. About 20% of the company’s workers are military veterans, Odendahl says.
Exploring the Labor Market: Convergence to Inflation, Growth and Employment in the U.S. Construction Industry, according to Odendahl
“A squad leader is a foreman with different skills,” Odendahl said. The ability to work outside. Change quickly and handle adversity that happens on project every day are what it comes down to, with the ability to change.
“Young people are starting to see the opportunity, both from an earnings potential and a growth potential that the construction industry offers,” Odendahl said. “We need to do a better job as an industry of telling some of the great things that are going on in construction. We are competing with all of the other industries in the economy for people.”
“We don’t need to be in an hurry to cut,” Fed chairman Jerome Powell said recently at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. “We can wait and become more confident that in fact inflation is coming down to 2%.”
Wage gains peaked in early 2022 and have slowed in the last few years, but inflation still out-performed them from late 2021, to early 2023. Average hourly earnings for workers rose 0.3 percent in March from the previous month and were up 4.1 percent from March 2023.
The labor market experts say that the continued strength may increase confidence in the FederalReserve that the US economy is in a healthy equilibrium and has reached a stable rate of commercial activity.
The government uses two surveys to track the labor market, and one of the surveys has weak hiring rates, which analysts think would indicate an economy already in recession.
“The vanishingly few areas to criticize this labor market are melting away,” said Andrew Flowers, a labor economist at Appcast, a recruitment advertising firm.
As the growth of the labor market slows, many worry that fewer jobs will be created in less lucrative sectors like government hiring and health care. Gains in health care — including hospitals, nursing and residential care facilities and outpatient services — led the way in this report, but job growth, for now, remains broad-based.
The “continued vigor,” said Joe Davis, the global chief economist at Vanguard, has come from “household balance sheets bolstered by pandemic-related fiscal policy and a virtuous cycle where job growth, wages and consumption fuel one another.”
Business productivity and work force participation have both increased, according to data analysts. Businesses, large and small, have to navigate an obstacle course this decade which has included a vaccine, inflation, and a rise in the cost of credit. But recently released data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis shows corporate profits have reached a record high.
Officials at the Fed, which rapidly raised interest rates in 2022 and early 2023 to combat inflation, have expressed cautious optimism that they are approaching their goals of low unemployment and more stable prices.
Inflation has fallen drastically from its peak of 7.1 percent, according to the Fed’s preferred measure. But it did not fall below 2.5 percent in February, which was still half a percentage point away from the target. And some worry that rising oil prices or geopolitical chaos could upend the delicate state of affairs.
Gilbertie predicts the future of the price of energy in the light of the FSB data on the PbT Hyper-Energy data
Gilbertie is the chief executive of Teucrium Trading and he believes that the price of energy could go up if there is more pressure on Russia and the economy keeps growing.
