By Carole Hawkins, Staff Writer
Andrew O’Brien last year exchanged a series of odd jobs in restaurants and car shops for a carpentry apprenticeship with Auld & White Constructors.
“I wanted to do something that actually could be a career, instead of working minimum wage jobs,” the 23-year-old said. “Something that would allow me to support a family.”
The construction industry needs more like O’Brien.
The Jacksonville metro area during the recession lost 48 percent of its construction jobs, according to Florida’s Bureau of Labor and Market Statistics. Now the housing industry has turned a corner and the jobs, up 15 percent so far in Jacksonville, are coming back.
But the workers aren’t.
“During the recession a lot of people got out of the business,” said Keith Ward, chairman of NEFBA’s Apprenticeship program. “The guys in their early 30s figured they’d find something else to do.”
Specialty tradesmen such as drywall hangers, electricians and plumbers disappeared from the business, and heavy equipment operators turned to professions like truck driving.
That affects general contractors such as Auld & White Constructors, which uses those businesses as subcontractors.
“We have a job right now at an assisted-living facility in Ponte Vedra where there are two (machine) operators and three pieces of equipment,” said Tim Conlan, vice president of operations. “In reality, we could use a third operator. Or a fourth operator and fourth piece of equipment. But they just don’t have those resources.”
Healing the workforce shortage isn’t as simple as hiring a crew of workers either. Companies can spend four years or more and thousands of dollars in apprenticeship training to turn new hires into skilled carpenters, plumbers, electricians and HVAC tradesmen. During the recession not as many workers were entered into the training pipeline.
Allstate Electrical Contractors, which installs primary and secondary utility conduits for JEA residential lines, cut its workforce during the recession by 35-40 percent. Because of the economy, the company also didn’t enroll any apprentices into training three years ago.
Now Allstate wants to sponsor as many as 10 employees in a training program, said company vice president Reece Hood. Those numbers are as high as before the industry’s downturn.
“I think the turnaround has caught everybody a little short on skilled manpower,” Hood said. “With the industry coming back, we’ll try to get as many new apprentices as we can in to plan for the future.”
It’s a deficit that’s being felt elsewhere.
The Northeast Florida Builders Association said it plans by 2015 to nearly double the number of students currently enrolled in its four-year apprenticeship training program, from 110 to 200.
“It is a big undertaking,” Ward said. “But there are a lot of guys with big companies now that are realizing they’ve got to get some people trained, because they’re understaffed.”
Ramping up training post-recession is good, but the construction worker shortage hasn’t been entirely caused by the recession, according to industry veterans.
Cliff McKendree of McKendree’s Plumbing & Heating has been saying for more than a decade that not enough young people are entering the skilled trades.
According to the Census Bureau, 44 percent of the construction workforce is 45 or older and nearly one out of every five construction workers is 55 or older. The average worker at McKendree’s company today is over 45.
“I’ll be the first to say our industry has not done that good of a job trying to promote ourselves as being a good honest profession,” he said. “I think we put too much emphasis on going to college and getting a degree. Some people are not meant to go to college.”
Ward, too, sees the aging of skilled tradesmen at his company, Thomas May Construction, where he serves as vice president.
Project managers, who work indoors, average about 30 years old. But the field workers, who work with their hands in the outdoors, are in their 30s, 40s and older.
“I have carpenters who are out there running work who are in their mid 50s and late 50s. They’re not going to work forever,” Ward said. “I’m in my early 50s. I hope to retire some day.”
In Ward’s day growing up in Jacksonville, a lot of people in their 20s and 30s entered the construction industry. Now that’s not happening so much.
O’Brien sought out his job because of two of his friends are in construction, one is an electrician and the other, an HVAC worker. But, a lot of his other friends work indoors.
“(Construction) is a job for people who don’t mind getting dirty, working with their hands, and putting in an honest hard eight hours of work a day,” O’Brien said. “A lot of people I know have jobs where they don’t work that hard.”
Despite the workload, O’Brien said he loves it.
“You’re always learning something new,” he said. “I’ve always been kind of an outdoorsy person.”