{"id":670,"date":"2021-08-27T00:12:26","date_gmt":"2021-08-27T00:12:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/djcoregon.com\/skilledmag\/?p=670"},"modified":"2022-08-24T14:07:16","modified_gmt":"2022-08-24T14:07:16","slug":"from-the-publisher-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/djcoregon.com\/skilledmag\/2021\/08\/27\/from-the-publisher-2\/","title":{"rendered":"From the Publisher"},"content":{"rendered":"

FROM THE PUBLISHER<\/span><\/strong><\/h3>\n

Jobs, Money and Safety: the pandemic reminds us just how important builders are to our community<\/span><\/p>\n

By NICK BJORK
\nnbjork@djcorprod.wpengine.com<\/a><\/p>\n

\"BjorkThe COVID-19 pandemic has affected every aspect of our lives. While most of those impacts have been negative, there have been some promising trends that make a career in the building industry more desirable \u2013 and important \u2013 than ever before.<\/p>\n

The ongoing health crisis is a glaring reminder of how important it is for our society to have sufficient, safe and functioning structures and infrastructure, particularly during times of public emergency. State and federal lawmakers have allocated trillions of dollars of investment to modernize, improve and expand our transportation infrastructure. As a result of the economic impact of the pandemic, we\u2019ve seen local, state and federal government agencies commit funds to an unprecedented amount of affordable housing projects in order to make sure our community has access to housing.<\/p>\n

On the private side, we continue to witness a trend of health care providers pushing forward projects at a rapid pace to add capacity and improve technology to ensure as many people get the best care as possible. With our move to a virtual work environment, we\u2019re seeing commercial and office building owners invest in retrofitting their buildings and improving technology. This has resulted in technology providers adding higher capacity internet infrastructure and led to private investment in new housing, restaurants and amenities in our suburbs as people are no longer tied to cities.
\nSurpassing everything else is the boom in industrial and logistics construction as e-commerce platforms like Amazon work to get you essentials as quickly as possible and businesses invest in domestic production and manufacturing automation to avoid further supply chain disruptions.<\/p>\n

While so many industries are struggling to get by, these trends have further accelerated our unprecedented building cycle that\u2019s been unfolding for more than a decade. As a result, there has never been a better time to pursue a career in building, and ensuring we meet that demand has never been as important as it is right now.<\/p>\n

The biggest issue facing the building industries is not having enough people to meet the demand of our communities. While every industry lost jobs during the pandemic, construction saw unemployment rates half of the overarching average, particularly in states like Oregon that deemed builders essential workers. Moreover, construction jobs are roaring back and after 11,000 new jobs in July, we\u2019ll soon surpass the all-time high for construction employment of 7.6 million workers. Employers are responding to this growing shortage with wages and salaries for construction at their highest point ever. Wages for construction workers have increased 28 percent over the past decade and average weekly hours are at their highest level since Q3 of 2019.<\/p>\n

People are understandably concerned with working conditions. Construction worksites have always required safe working conditions and the work involves interacting with others in tight quarters. Yet, building industry leaders were on the forefront of developing health and safety protocols. In Oregon, the Oregon-Columbia chapter of the Associated General Contractors worked closely with the governor and state officials to develop safety measures that allowed projects to continue during the pandemic. This attention to safety has led to an injury, illness and incident rate for construction lower than the overarching average, and nearly 50 percent less than the rate in industries like retail.<\/p>\n

While we\u2019re still uncovering the true impacts of the pandemic on our society and economy, one thing that\u2019s become clear is that in order to provide our communities with the physical space they need, we need to ensure the workforce is driven by our brightest, hardest-working and most innovative young leaders.<\/p>\n

\n

Sincerely,<\/p>\n

Nick Bjork<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected every aspect of our lives. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":16,"featured_media":690,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18615],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-670","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-headlines"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/djcoregon.com\/skilledmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/670"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/djcoregon.com\/skilledmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/djcoregon.com\/skilledmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/djcoregon.com\/skilledmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/16"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/djcoregon.com\/skilledmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=670"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/djcoregon.com\/skilledmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/670\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/djcoregon.com\/skilledmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/690"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/djcoregon.com\/skilledmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=670"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/djcoregon.com\/skilledmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=670"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/djcoregon.com\/skilledmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=670"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}