The national unemployment rate for the construction industry rose to 17.1 percent as another 64,000 construction workers lost their jobs in September, according to an analysis of new employment data released Oct. 2. With 80 percent of layoffs occurring in nonresidential construction, Ken Simonson, chief economist for the Associated General Contractors of America, said the decline in nonresidential construction has eclipsed housing’s problems.

“The housing industry may be stabilizing, but the broader construction crisis is only getting worse,” Simonson said. “While the stimulus is helping slow the decline, it’s clearly far from enough to reverse sweeping industry-wide layoffs on its own.”

The new September employment data assembled by the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed 50,800 layoffs in the nonresidential construction sector this September, while there were 13,300 fewer workers in the residential construction sector during the same period. He added that over the last year, 649,800 nonresidential construction workers were laid off while 443,000 residential workers lost their jobs.

He added that since December 2007, residential and nonresidential construction employment shrank by 1.5 million. In other words, one out of every five people working in construction in 2007 has lost their job.

“When you’ve got skilled carpenters using their hard hats to panhandle on the streets of Reno, something’s not working,” said Stephen E. Sandherr, the AGC’s chief executive officer, who met with contractors and construction workers in the Nevada city last week to release a new industry recovery plan. “It’s time to put in place commonsense, pro-growth policies that will get workers back to hammering nails instead of collecting quarters.”

Sandherr said the association is calling for a series of tax credits, incentives and deductions designed to boost demand for private-sector construction activity that represents the bulk of the construction market. The plan also calls for programmatic new investments in infrastructure and policy revisions designed to jump start needed work on highways and transit systems, water systems, federal building and new sources of renewable energy.

Simonson said looking ahead, “there remains little relief in sight for the nation’s commercial construction industry.” But McGraw-Hill Construction Vice President for Economic Affairs Robert Murray took a slightly more positive view, saying “the volume of construction starts remains quite weak, but since March there’s been growing evidence that activity has at least leveled off, and may now be gradually trending upward.”

Murray said: “public works construction has seen the early signs of support from the federal stimulus funding, with more strengthening expected in coming months. Single family housing apparently reached bottom in early 2009, and has now moved upward in six out of the past seven months.

“For nonresidential building, the positive development is that the rate of descent has eased from the severe declines witnessed in late 2008 and early 2009. At the same time, nonresidential building still faces considerable constraints, such as mounting vacancies, tight bank lending standards, and eroding state fiscal health.”