The American workers’ workforce is filled with signs of a picking up labor market.
A home builder in Orlando, Florida, wants to add four construction workers to a six-person team amid rising housing demand during the pandemic. In Atlanta, a forklift driver rakes overtime because the warehouse where he works is so busy distributing packages. A Chicago-based truck-trailer manufacturer increasingly organizes drive-through job fairs and increases wages by up to 7% as the workforce increases in its nine manufacturing sites.
Nationally, employment in housing, parcel delivery and storage is now surpassing pre-pandemic levels. Manufacturers have been steadily adding jobs after lowering payrolls last spring, although employment is about 5% lower than in February 2020, according to Labor Department data. Job openings in many worker occupations broke above pre-virus levels last summer and remain significantly high, according to figures from the online job site Indeed.
The power of housing and e-commerce during the pandemic has helped revitalize people in working-class occupations hard hit by previous recessions. Many economists and companies expect worker jobs to continue to grow, albeit at a slower pace, after the coronavirus has contained. They predict that the key factors driving employers’ demand for workers – a boom in online ordering and a booming housing market – will largely persist, even after vaccines have spread widely and consumers shift some of their spending from goods to services. .
“Demand for the workers will not decline,” said David Berson, chief economist at Nationwide Mutual Insurance Co. “We still need good storage space. Undefined We will continue to see great strength in demand in the construction industry, particularly residential construction.”