Following national crises such as the Great Recession in 2008 and the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020-2021, the United States has had to rebuild its workforce more than once after projects stalled and mass layoffs occurred.
An ongoing labor shortage in the construction sector has a direct impact on the housing sector and is currently one of the main causes of the unaffordable housing situation, experts say.
“There are currently approximately 340,000 vacancies in construction. And depending on which metric you follow, you’re looking at somewhere between 400,000 and 700,000 jobs that you would need to hire annually, on top of normal hiring to meet construction demand,” said Tanaya Srini, senior advisor at US. Ministry of Housing and Urban Development, said Friday during a panel event at the Ivory Prize Housing Innovation Summit 2024.
How technology affects construction productivity
Furthermore, Srini added that productivity in the construction sector is stagnating:
“Since 2000, the productivity of the total economy has increased by about 50%, manufacturing productivity by 90% and construction productivity by only 10%. So we are in a situation where labor cannot compensate for low productivity growth because we cannot hire enough people to meet this need.”
“That said, it’s a great time to be a ‘homeowner’ because everyone is concerned with this issue,” she said.
Kevin Albert, founder and CEO of Canvas, a company that provides automation through its technology to the construction industry, said one solution to the productivity problem – which could be seen as controversial – is to integrate the latest technology to help with labor jobs.
He noted that while the latest technology is used in the exterior process of home construction, productivity is lost during interior work because hand tools are still the norm.
One of the Canvas products is an employee-operated drywall finishing robot, which reduces a normal five-day process to just two, increasing productivity.
“Our workers will bring in the canvas machine, they will select the work areas they want to work on, and the machine will use a precise and precise spray to apply all the material in one pass and one drying cycle, and the next day you can sand that back to a final finish, instead of four drying cycles, five days of repeatedly coming back to a wall,” Albert explained.
He added: “One of the biggest benefits we see, in addition to increasing productivity and reducing the costs required to do the work, is that it actually takes much of the burden off the bodies of the employee takes away.”
Chad Bowker, CEO of Capsule, a company that specializes in the design, manufacturing and installation of prefabricated modular products, said during the panel that while there is an industry-wide branding issue that robots will take over human jobs, this in his perspective will also happen. just open more doors for people.
“Every automation that takes place, everything that comes from our production facility into an assembly line, starts on a machine. And while we don’t refer to these robots as people taking over jobs, they are opening up jobs. I completely understand the branding issue,” Bowker said. “It is branded as a zero-labor line by the factory that sells it. And of course it is not zero labor. You have to do a lot of things with it after it comes off that machine, but it’s inherently just a talking point.
Fellow panelist Paul Cardis, CEO of On3, a field knowledge management system, echoed Bowker’s sentiment. He repeated a phrase he learned from a previous professor: “AI will not replace humans. It is humans using AI that will replace humans.”
“People will be able to embrace robotics,” Cardis added. “We have actually embraced the policy in our company, and I encourage others to do the same, that we will not fire anyone because of AI. … We agree to retrain that person and place him in a new role.”
“I encourage other companies to embrace that so we can move forward together in an additive way.”
