Editorial: If we want to rebuild America, who will do it?

From the Mississippi River’s mouth below New Orleans all the way up to Baton Rouge, there’s a building boom going on.

That’s good for Louisiana and for America, as high-paying jobs in petrochemical manufacturing in particular are serving markets around the world.

Who’s going to build those facilities?

Louisiana’s got a large and sophisticated workforce in industrial construction. In the nine-parish Baton Rouge region, for example, the boom in construction work — led by petrochemical facilities costing hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars, taking years to build — created a record of more than 422,000 jobs, according to the Baton Rouge Area Chamber. Construction jobs posted a 4,800-job gain from March 2022 to March 2023, a 10.3% increase.

BRAC’s number-cruncher Andrew Fitzgerald points to a significant trend amid the good news: a “tight” labor market.

He reported that “while there were nearly 32,000 unique job postings in the region throughout March, fewer than 13,000 residents were out of a job and looking for one, meaning there were about 2.5 open jobs for each person looking.”

Louisiana’s labor force participation rate is lower than the national average, as experts reported in a recent presentation for the Louisiana Association of Business and Industry.

And there is growing concern nationally about labor force gaps, not just in our important petrochemical sector. The rate of people participating in the workforce has risen since the coronavirus pandemic, naturally, but it’s still below the pre-pandemic level of 63.3%, reports Joseph Kane of The Brookings Institution.

Underlying those global numbers is a specific challenge for construction.

Kane noted the events of the last couple of years, such as the giant new infrastructure law and major new federal subsidies aimed at building science and technology projects, including chip-making plants, in America.

“Difficulties in hiring, training, and retaining a younger, more diverse workforce limit economic opportunity, slow down projects, and pose the very real possibility of mission failure for infrastructure employers, including the owners and operators of these systems,” Kane said of the nation.

And as he pointed out, that’s not just in the industrial construction sector we’re used to in Louisiana. Electricians and other workers are going to be vital to achieving big changes, like building charging stations for electric cars nationwide. We need more of them in Louisiana.

State government is also all-in on expanding broadband internet access, as it should be, and that too requires more skilled workers.

Kane’s analysis of the overall workforce obstacles facing this country is particularly relevant to Louisiana: Demographic realities mean that more women of color, in particular, will be needed in well-paying professions that might have not been so welcoming in the past — such as construction. That’s a great opportunity for Louisiana’s people, but also a major challenge. 

“Time is fleeting, and the federal money is already flowing,” Kane wrote. “The path of least resistance — relying on the same types of workers, hiring and training strategies, and more — will not only fail to curb the outflow of talent across the infrastructure sector, but also fail to truly expand the talent pool and maximize the current window of federal funding.”

In Louisiana, we’re doing many positive things in, for example, technical and community colleges focused on workforce preparation.

Will that be enough? We hope so, because the benefits of growth go to regions that have the educated and trained workforce to get the big jobs done.