BLS: Strong Hiring in Manufacturing, Construction

In June 2018, 12,751,000 people were employed in manufacturing and 7,242,000 in construction. Construction employment has grown by 4.4 percent in the last 12 months, while jobs in manufacturing have increased by 2.6 percent. In the last three months, however, manufacturing employment has gained almost twice the number of jobs as construction, according to Steel Market Update’s latest analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data. Strong hiring in both construction and manufacturing are positive indicators of future steel sales.

Table 1 breaks total employment down into service and goods-producing industries and then into private and government employees. Most of the goods-producing employees work in manufacturing and construction and the components of these two sectors of most relevance to steel people are broken out in Table 1.