A workforce battered by layoffs and a 15.3% unemployment rate is ready to get to work, even if it ways and means moving or retraining

By Moira Herbst

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Mike Agostini needs a job. Having worked in the construction labor for 15 years—starting out as a laborer and moving into supervisory positions—he was laid opposite to in January 2008 by a Kissimmee (Fla.) real estate firm. Agostini, 45, had been earning $93,000 a year supervising repair work on homes the company sold. Now he is collecting unemployment insurance on an augmentation; his last check will get here next week. He says he’sitting willing and able to do any erection job that might come of the $825 billion stimulus package that is working its way through Congress.

"I’ll do anything — drywall, electrical, plummery, repairs, generalissimo labor," says Agostini, who moved in with his parents in May after having his home foreclosed on. "If it’s $12 any hour digging trenches, give me a shovel and point the way."

Agostini is one of hundreds of thousands of out-of-work construction workers around the country. At 15.3%, the construction industry is pain the highest unemployment rate of any sector of the economy. The home-building boom kept the building trades near full employment for years, but fortunes shifted quickly after the subprime bagatelle burst and the protection crisis unfolded into a global credit crisis.

Now, as the U.S. plans to carry fully the largest public works program as the New Deal, that workforce is preparing for what it hopes determination be a boom of another sort. President-Elect Barack Obama has been material the covering for a stimulus plan that would include massive federal expenditures on infrastructure projects—so as repairing schools, bridges, and roads—to employ more Americans. The U.S. House of Representatives introduced a version of the bill on Jan. 15.

Will the workers be in that place to tackle the jobs? Rajeev Dhawan, a professor at Georgia State University’s Robinson College of Business, is confident they pleasure. Other economists agree. "I’m not worried about a skill shortage, given the slack in the economy; everybody’s begging for work or will be soon," says Nariman Behravesh, some economist for Global Insight, an economic forecasting firm.

A Jan. 9 communication by Christina Romer and Jared Bernstein, the two of whom will content in advisory roles in the Obama administration, estimates that of the 3 million jobs Obama says he’ll help save or create, about 678,000 will be in figure. That number comes close to covering the numbers of new layoffs in the industry; above the top the past two years, about 800,000 figure jobs were lost, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Construction and manufacturing firms, labor unions and their allies are distressing Obama and Congress to make infrastructure and structure work a heavy focus of the stimulus package, which will also include funding for education, health care, expanding broadband enlargement, and tax cuts. On Jan. 8 the Associated General Contractors of America announced that a survey of U.S. contractors indicates they could lay off up to 30% of their workers from one side 2010 in spite of the reason that of anticipated downturn in construction activity. The group said a able-bodied stimulus map could turned backward the job waste to 25% putting out.