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This Spotlight on Statistics examines the demographic and socioeconomic characteristics of construction industry workers, putting these characteristics in context by comparing them to those of workers overall.
Business dynamism refers to the continuous process of firm entry, growth, contraction, and exit, and the simultaneous creation and destruction of jobs. A healthy economy is marked by low barriers to entry for new firms and a labor market that permits workers to move easily between jobs.
This Spotlight on Statistics compares employment before and during the COVID-19 pandemic for men and women and for different racial and ethnic groups, age groups, and other worker characteristics.
This spotlight highlights special features of statistics from the Business Employment Dynamics (BED) program by age and size. BED quarterly data consist of gross job gains and gross job losses statistics from 1992 forward. The data help to provide a picture of the dynamic state of the labor market.
During the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, job losses in large private sector industries such as food services and drinking places received a lot of attention. State and local government also had high job losses. From March 2020 to March 2021, employment fell by 5.1 percent in state government and 6.5 percent in local government, compared with a 4.3-percent decrease in the private sector.