Atlanta construction jobs have been hard to find for some time now. So it was no surprise when the Associated General Contractors of America recently found the Metro Atlanta area lost almost 20 percent of its construction jobs from June 2008 to June of this year.

Out of the 352 metro areas looked at, Atlanta ranked 307. The city lost 25,700 jobs, a decline of 19.8 percent, from last year. During June of 2008, the area had 130,100 construction jobs, compared to only 104,400 construction jobs in June of this year.

In fact, during June, the Atlanta-Sandry Springs-Marietta area’s construction industry employed 104,400 workers during June, according to the United States Department of Labor Bureau of Labor Statistics. This is down from 104,500 workers during May and a 19.8 percent decrease from last year.

Throughout the country, employment in the construction industry decreased in all but 19 metro areas during June.

“Construction workers remain, unfortunately, on the leading edge of job losses during this recession,” Ken Simonson, chief economist for Associated General Contractors of America, said. “While other sectors of the economy have been hit hard, construction employment has been devastated.”

Even worse than Atlanta were Pascagoula, Miss., and Reno-Sparks, Nev., both of which lost one out of every three construction jobs during the last year. On top of that, only 10 cities saw an increase in construction employment during the last year. There were nine areas that saw no change in construction employment.

In Columbus, Ind., employment in the construction industry increased by more than 31 percent from last year. In the Weirton-Steubenville area along the West Virginia-Ohio border, construction employment increased by nearly 17 percent.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 29th, 2009 at 10:24 am and is filed under jobs, Construction. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.