The Incredible Shrinking Infrastructure Workforce, What To Do About It
Date Posted: May 30, 2023
Posted In: Workforce,
From Brookings: It has been over a year since the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act passed, unleashing an unprecedented $864 billion in federal funding to improve the country’s transportation, water, energy, and broadband systems. This comes on top of hundreds of billions of dollars for related climate and industrial investments in the Inflation Reduction Act and CHIPS and Science Act. And with this funding has come the enormous potential to support up to 15 million new jobs over the next decade, according to the most ambitious estimates. Many state and local entities eligible to receive this funding—think transportation departments, water utilities, and more—are scrambling to secure new pots of money and get workers ready for all the projects to come.
The problem with this gold rush mentality is that federal, state, and local leaders often overlook a fundamental problem facing the country: They cannot even hold onto current infrastructure workers, let alone find more of them to carry out this pressing work.
The U.S. infrastructure workforce is rapidly losing talent. As recent Brookings research shows, nearly 17 million infrastructure workers are projected to permanently leave their jobs over the next decade due to a wave of retirements, job transfers, and other labor market shifts. Infrastructure workers are not just construction workers—they are plumbers, electricians, civil engineering technicians, or dozens of other occupations, primarily involved in the skilled trades. And they are responsible for operating and maintaining our roads, rails, pipes, power plants, and other facilities over many decades. Filling these shoes is not simply about patching a pothole or building a bridge—it represents a generational challenge affecting many industries nationally.
Since some of these 17 million workers may only be switching positions and not leaving the sector entirely, this figure does not necessarily capture the full range of the country’s infrastructure hiring needs. But it does signal a growing retention gap. For instance, bus drivers, dredge operators, and helpers to electricians are among the infrastructure occupations with the most significant “separations”—an average annual measure estimated by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) to capture how many workers are projected to leave their jobs. Each of these occupations is projected to see 12% (or more) of their workers leave annually over the next decade, which exceeds the separations rate for all occupations nationally (11.5%). Moreover, these separations greatly exceed the total growth rate (i.e., new jobs) estimated for all occupations nationally (5.3%) over the next decade.
Yet filling these new infrastructure jobs also represents a generational opportunity. Infrastructure jobs pay 30% more to lower-income workers and those just starting their careers relative to all jobs nationally, while also posing lower formal educational barriers to entry. But too many workers—especially younger workers, women, and people of color—continue to be sidelined from these careers. The infrastructure workforce is aging, male, and white; only 11% are 24 years old or younger, 18.5% are women, and under a third are people of color. Many prospective job seekers not only lack awareness these positions exist, but they also lack flexible and accessible pathways to fill them, including struggles to gain needed on-the-job training and limited supportive services (e.g., child care, transportation).