The economy has recovered, and the construction industry is finding more work and fewer skilled workers. What does that mean?
A recent study by TSheets reported by Simon Worsfold says that construction companies are adding fewer workers than in 2016 and that those company’s workers “are working longer hours than at any point in the past three years.”
According to the study of 12,000 anonymous timesheets in the construction industry, through October of 2017, “TSheets’ data shows that construction workers are working, on average, 39.6 hours a week. This is an increase of more than one hour per employee per week compared to 2015, when the average was 38.4 hours. In 2016, the average was 39.2 hours a week, per employee.”
More work usually means more overtime for the workforce. The TSheets study found, “The number of employees working overtime, however, remains low. TSheets’ data shows that just 1 percent of the construction workforce currently works more than 40 hours a week, but when they do, these employees work, on average, an extra 9.6 hours. This means 69,000 construction workers across the US worked almost 50 hours this week.”
So, while we have written about a widespread labor shortage in the commercial construction industry, it appears from the TSheets study that not many workers are being called into overtime situations.
We did note two things that might be interesting for TSheets to take a look at.
Firstly, in their user map on their website, we noted that they had users in Georgia, but no other southern states like our home state of Texas. Climate might have an impact on the hours worked. Also since the major hurricanes hit Texas and Florida, we wonder whether those workers are working more overtime trying to rebuild?
Secondly, according to Forbes, TSheets is being bought by Intuit and will become a part of the QuickBooks platform, an opportunity for a number of small companies to combine their time sheet tracking with QuickBooks. You can read more about it here.
