On Tuesday, the Mineta Transportation Institute released a report on how to alleviate labor shortages in the transportation construction sector.
The report looked at lessons learned in the agriculture, tech and healthcare sectors to address workforce shortages in transportation construction. Without a workforce to complete them, the improvements to critical transportation infrastructure can’t move forward, the institute said. Even as more funding to address infrastructure issues becomes available through the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, the nation faces a critical shortage of construction workers that prevents moving forward on projects.
Researchers said they looked at literature, as well as conducted informal interviews with stakeholders and other sources to gain insight on how to address the shortages. The major finding, researchers said, was that there is simply not enough workers. Other economic sectors are facing or have faced similar labor shortages, the study found, and they have address the issue by raising awareness of increased demand for skills, recruiting workers with the proper skills and retaining quality workers so positions remain filled.
To that end, the report recommended that highway construction skills should be taught at trade schools and training programs led by experienced workers; that the government subsidize incentives for instructors at trade schools and training programs to prevent instructor shortages, and that government institute incentive programs for construction workers themselves to alleviate labor shortages.
“Each industry has unique challenges and constraints. Healthcare is primarily focused on increasing recruitment because that would also help them solve their retention issues. Agriculture is focused on retention and recruitment since they cannot find a way to make farm work attractive to the public, and their incumbent workers are starting to retire. Technology is a large and diverse economic sector and has a broad set of issues, but because it requires the least manual labor amongst the three, many of the solutions are not as applicable to highway construction,” the study’s authors wrote.
The report found that many construction firms are already implementing solutions like pay increases (86 percent), incentives and bonuses (45 percent) and enhancing benefits (24 percent). Additional strategies could include offering reduced-cost training in exchange for work commitments.