Why is there more work for specialty contractors like electricians?
Why is there more work for specialty contractors like electricians?
If you open the jobs report to Table B-1, which details hiring by industry, specialty trade contractors are identified as one subsector. These are workers responsible for specific tasks on a construction job — think plumbing, electrical work, pouring concrete. The sector added 23,000 jobs in September, most of those in nonresidential work, for a total of 150,000 new jobs from the same time last year.
Electrical contractor Kelso-Burnett was founded in Chicago in 1908, not long after electricity became a thing regular people wanted. “Back when they were … converting the old gas piping to electricity,” said William Martin, a branch manager for the company which does electrical work in pretty much anything besides a house.
He said of the 100-plus years Kelso-Burnett’s been in business, the last two have been among its busiest ever. The firm has brought on additional staff to keep up with all of the work, which includes wiring brand data centers.
“As you can imagine, there’s a lot of power needed … for those projects. They eat up a lot of resources, a lot of electricians,” he said.
Another kind of building that’s hungry for electricians? Old office spaces.
Martin said in the in the shuffle to return to work after COVID-19 stay-at-home orders, lots of employers have been moving to new digs that aren’t necessarily in new buildings. They need to make sure the lights go on, along with the printer and broadband router.
“They want to build their space out the way that … they want their employees to work, and then they hire people like ourselves to go in there and remodel it and rewire it to their needs,” Martin said.
Those needs could also mean work for other specialty contractors, like plumbers and painters, along with retrofitting older spaces.
There’s also federal money coming from the CHIPS and Inflation Reduction acts to build new kinds of worksites, like factories, said economist Guy Berger with the Burning Glass Institute.
“There are different kinds of facilities, particularly in manufacturing, than the ones we’ve had for a long time. Yeah, that requires labor, and sometimes fairly specialized labor,” he said.
The growth of these kinds of jobs signals real optimism about certain kinds of industries, said economist Christine McDaniel, a senior research fellow at George Mason University’s Mercatus Center.
“You don’t build a data center because, you know, you think the economy might do well, but you’re not sure. You’re building a data center because there’s long-term demand,” she said.
And once facilities like data centers are built, there are housing, retailers and hotels that need to be built nearby, said Martin of Kelso-Burnett. And that means more work for electrical contractors like him.
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