A mechanism for foreign-born workers

They show up most every day with hard hats in hand, and put in a full day riveting together the buildings sprouting across southwestern Connecticut, whether new homes in Greenwich, huge structures such as the SoNo Collection mall taking shape in Norwalk, or renovations at schools and other public buildings across the region.

These days they are getting harder to find — with possible implications for the costs and timelines of projects that would not be built without their work.

In a recently published Associated General Contractors survey with Autodesk of more than 165 Northeast builders, of contractors looking to hire hourly tradesmen for construction jobs, 86 percent said they had difficulties filling those jobs.

Only one in 10 Northeast builders had no jobs to fill, according to the AGC survey, illuminating the difficulties facing contractors and their clients as private-sector employment in Connecticut and the nation continues to climb even as foundations are poured for new projects, whether new homes or in big commercial buildings.

In southwestern Connecticut, where a slow-growing employment market has become the new norm, builders were a notable outlier in adding 1,400 jobs in the past year — an 11 percent hiring clip that was among the 21 fastest rates in the nation, according to AGC.

Higher prices with ‘a full belly’

The impact of worker shortages is cascading into projects, according to AGC, with nearly half of general contractors nationally telling the association it is taking them longer to complete projects currently under way. About one-quarter say they now are baking longer timelines into their bids for future work in anticipation of problems securing qualified tradespeople.

“Remember that (when) the construction industry in Connecticut was struggling with an aging workforce problem before the downturn, that situation was exacerbated when the industry had to scale back on its training programs for years because (the state) did not want to train people for unemployment,” said Don Shubert, head of the Connecticut Construction Industries Association. “Now the industry is faced with a five- or six-year skills gap. The good news is that we have very well-established, privately funded apprenticeship training programs that can be easily ramped up to meet demand if work stabilizes again.”

Mark De Pecol ran a construction company before creating Senior Living Development with offices in Norwalk and Westport, with SLD getting senior communities designed and approved before selling the turnkey projects to other developers to build and run.

“It’s all cyclical,” De Pekol told Hearst Connecticut Media. “The labor market tightens up and (labor) prices go up. Contractors who have a full belly quote higher prices. Things turn, and they get hungry again.”

Still, AGC found that wages have been slower to follow, with 62 percent of construction firms nationally reporting they had increased their base pay for craftsmen as a result of difficulties filling available slots, and only one in four adding benefits or incentive pay such as bonuses to lure workers.

AGC sees immigration as one answer to the problem, saying the U.S. government should issue more visas to people with construction skills. And it would

Carol Kaliff / Hearst Connecticut Media Workers put up signs in April under the Interstate 84 overpass near Exit 6 in Danbury. Construction crews began work reconfiguring the exit and making upgrades to the roads April 2015.