When big construction projects (Hard Rock, A's stadium) come online, do construction companies need to bring in outside laborers? Or are most of the workers local?
One expert with whom we spoke said the construction-job market is “pretty fungible,” meaning that workers go where the jobs are. But we wanted to drill down deeper, so we spoke with Jeffrey Waddoups of the Center for Business & Economic Research at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas.
“It's my understanding that most of the workers will be local,” Waddoups said of the Hard Rock and baseball-stadium plans. “The massive construction projects like CityCenter back in 2007 through 2009, which was the largest private sector building project on record, required that we brought in many workers from the outside.”
He continued by saying the exact number of migrant construction workers is difficult to quantify. “Look at how much construction employment there was when building CityCenter among other big projects in Nevada,” Waddoups said. “We had over 11 percent employed in construction — 143,000 workers. That construction boom attracted outsiders. Actually, this is when the major construction of Fontainebleau occurred as well. We're still a ways from that and we have a much larger population now.”
Waddoups appended a chart that broke down construction workers as a percentage of the Nevada population. Its first peak was in 2006 (early going for CityCenter) at 143,080 or 11.2 percent. After the Great Recession, in 2012, it hit a nadir of 51,930 or 4.5 percent.
Construction employment could never quite challenge the CityCenter boom years, even in 2016 when it surged back to 75,730 and 5.8 percent of the populace. Those numbers kept growing through 2019, when there was a second peak of 96,200 (or 6.8 percent). COVID dealt a setback to construction, despite its designation by then-Gov. Steve Sisolak as an essential industry. Employment fell in 2020 to 94,470, improving only slightly in 2021.
The following year saw a significant ramp-up, to the point where construction workers in Nevada numbered 120,720. That’s 7.6 percent of the Silver State’s population.
With such a large workforce on tap, we’re sure the Hard Rock and (if it ever gets funded) the Athletics’ stadium will not have to look outside Nevada for their construction needs.
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Bob Nelson
Aug-25-2024
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