Special Report: 7.9.2009

Posted by TED Magazine on Thursday, July 09, 2009

Stats on Electricians & ECs

By Joe Salimando

There are a lot of statistics in this world. You get to various levels here: data, information, knowledge, and understanding. The purpose of this piece is to present data, help you understand the value of the information, and (perhaps, if I’m any good) get you to know more about it.

Understanding? I’m not arrogant enough to assume that I fully understand all this, much less that I can transmit comprehension.

This is a bit long compared to the normal Special Report, not in verbiage, but in bits and bytes. I elected to put all the data on one web page. The option was to divide this up into two or three SRs; I choose to simplify things for you.

Future Electrician Needs

In a piece written for Wireville.com, I offered the table that follows (edited just a bit to make it fit here). For a complete explanation, see that brief.

Occupation	Total employment (000’s)		2006-2016 change in total employment		2006 number that self- employ %	2006-2016 average annual job openings (000’s)
	2006	2016	Number (000)	%		Due to growth and total replacement needs	Due to growth and net replacement needs	2006 Median annual earnings (Dollars)
Electricians	705	757	52	7.4	10.7	79	23	43,610
Electrical power-line installers and repairers	112	120	8	7.2	0.6	6	4	50,780
Helpers-Electricians	105	112	7	6.8	2.9	35	3	23,760

 

Electricians Who Work for ECs

Another brief for Wireville.com included the table below; find words explaining the thing here.

Occupation	2006 employment		Projected 2016 employment		Change, 2006-2016
	Number	Percent distribution	Number	Percent distribution	Number	Percent
Total, all occupations	903,700	100.00	971,300	100.00	67,600	7.5
Electricians	443,111	49.03	481,763	49.60	38,652	8.7
Helpers-Electricians	92,278	10.21	97,774	10.07	5,497	6.0
First-line supervisors/managers of construction trades and extraction workers	38,588	4.27	40,462	4.17	1,874	4.9
Telecommunications line installers and repairers	24,428	2.70	25,614	2.64	1,187	4.9
Telecommunications equipment installers and repairers, except line installers	23,031	2.55	32,602	3.36	9,571	41.6
Office clerks, general	21,095	2.33	21,792	2.24	697	3.3
Bookkeeping, accounting, and auditing clerks	18,305	2.03	19,194	1.98	889	4.9
Security and fire alarm systems installers	16,172	1.79	16,957	1.75	786	4.9
Cost estimators	15,964	1.77	18,085	1.86	2,121	13.3
General and operations managers	15,274	1.69	14,414	1.48	-860	-5.6

How Many Contractors?

The Census Bureau does an Economic Census every five years. The 2007 Census data is now being crunched; the first report on electrical contracting is due out this fall.
Until then, there are two places to look:

1. The 2002 Census; this data is mighty old and mighty moldy.

2. The 2006 County Business Patterns (CBP) report from the Census Department for 2006; this data is more recent (less moldy), but damn limited. It tells you just a bit about what the national electrical contracting picture looked like in March 2006.

[On the other hand: The CBP report can produce statewide data on the number of contracting establishments and the number of electricians for you, if you become familiar with it. You can drill down to the county level, too. Go to this page to start drilling down—to the state and then county level—to get a localized count of ECs.]

What we have until the 2007 Census results are finalized and published to the web (sometime before Christmas 2009, I think) is the 2006 CBP count: 77,516 electrical contracting establishments.

How Many Electricians?

One of the problems with all this data is differentiating between the various classifications. For example, up above we have:

903,700 employees of electrical contractors in the United States in 2006
AND
705,000 professional electricians in the United States in 2006.
AND
443,111 professional electricians working for ECs in 2006.

Confused? Well might you be!

The 443,111 electricians working for contractors that are “supported” are not the end of the story, which is why the big table above lists nine other occupations of EC employees. There are helpers. There are security installers, telecom line installers, non-line telecom installers. And then there are the support staff.

• Are the security and telecom people electricians? NO.
• Do they work for what the government calls “electrical contractors,” then? YES.
• Does this mean that the government lumps together ECs and security firms and datacom firms? PROBABLY.

The 705,000 electricians at work in the United States include skilled electrical workers who do not labor every day for ECs. Here, from the same source (Bureau of Labor Statistics), is a look at where the electricians worked in 2006:

Note that I’ve rearranged and simplified this table a bit, and added the column on the far left-hand side, which ranks the employers of electricians who are not electrical contractors. So the “5” next to Motor vehicle parts manufacturing means that industry is the fifth-largest non-EC employer of electricians in the United States.

2006 Electrician Employment in ALL Industries (With 2016 Projections)
Industry		2006 employment		Projected 2016 employment		Change, 2006-2016
		Number	Percent distribution	Number	Percent distribution	Number	Percent
	Total employment, all workers	705,015	100.00	757,438	100.00	52,423	7.4
	Total wage and salary employment	629,256	89.25	673,985	88.98	44,729	7.1
	Electrical contractors	443,111	62.85	481,763	63.60	38,652	8.7
	Self-employed workers, all jobs	75,759	10.75	83,453	11.02	7,693	10.2
	Self-employed workers, primary job	64,835	9.20	71,620	9.46	6,785	10.5
	Self-employed workers, secondary job	10,924	1.55	11,833	1.56	909	8.3
1	Local government	15,740	2.23	18,334	2.42	2,594	16.5
2	Nonresidential building construction	9,799	1.39	11,384	1.50	1,585	16.2
3	Employment services	9,746	1.38	8,313	1.10	-1,433	-14.7
4	Plumbing, heating, and air-conditioning contractors	8,792	1.25	10,294	1.36	1,502	17.1
5	Motor vehicle parts manufacturing	8,149	1.16	6,727	0.89	-1,422	-17.4
6	Electric power generation, transmission and distribution	7,125	1.01	6,795	0.90	-330	-4.6
7	Colleges, universities, and professional schools, public and private	6,241	0.89	7,239	0.96	998	16.0
8	Residential building construction	5,415	0.77	6,322	0.83	908	16.8
9	Federal government, excluding postal service	4,750	0.67	4,656	0.61	-94	-2.0
10	Ship and boat building	3,766	0.53	4,370	0.58	605	16.1
11	Coal mining	3,382	0.48	3,542	0.47	159	4.7
12	State government	3,329	0.47	3,387	0.45	58	1.8
13	General medical and surgical hospitals, public and private	3,280	0.47	3,765	0.50	485	14.8
14	Iron and steel mills and ferroalloy manufacturing	3,225	0.46	2,251	0.30	-974	-30.2
15	Power and communication line and related structures construction	2,886	0.41	3,147	0.42	262	9.1
16	Pulp, paper, and paperboard mills	2,767	0.39	1,990	0.26	-777	-28.1
17	Elementary and secondary schools, public and private	2,671	0.38	2,918	0.39	247	9.3
18	Other fabricated metal product manufacturing	2,336	0.33	2,146	0.28	-190	-8.1

“NonEmployer” Contractors

The government tracks (every year) the number of “nonemployer” companies, which you can think of as companies that don’t have employees. In plain English, the mom-and-pop companies, in which everyone who works is an owner (and vice-versa).

In other words, this is a COUNT of the number of self-employed people working (either seven-day weeks or just on weekends) as electricians. These are small enterprises. Below find data for 2003 and 2006 for electrical contractors:

                                                               2003                           2006

NonEmployer companies                      106,802                       119,657
Sales                                                    $4,102,949,000           $5,457,278,000
Sales per Company                              $38,416                       $45,608

# companies Sole Proprietors               98,826                         110,400
# companies Corporations                      6,192                            7,334
# companies Proprietorships                   1,784                           1,923

Yes, the per-company sales increase from 2003 (which was a year in which the nation was climbing out of the stock-market bomb) to 2006 is impressive—almost 19%, no doubt outpacing inflation. Remember, folks were withdrawing equity from their homes in this period and using it to do home improvements.

AND, YES!, there were 119,657 of these companies in 2006 (of which 7,334 are partnerships of more than one person, one assumes). If you want to make assumptions here, you can “guess” that, in 2006, at least 127,000 electricians were working for themselves.
WAIT: This conflicts DRAMATICALLY with the big table above, which showed 64,835 self-employed professional electricians working for themselves as “primary job” and another 10,924 electricians working for themselves as “secondary job.”

How could we have 127,000 or more electricians working for themselves in the non-employer count and only 75,759 self-employed electricians delineated (for the same year, 2006) in the big table above?

I honestly don’t know. The things I suspect are:

(a) undercounting or miscounting;
(b) some people doing electrical work without the proper credentials;
(c) retirees working here and there (for a season?);
(d) more moonlighters than can be counted (10,924 is not very many out of 705,000 professionals); and
(e) things I can’t or don’t even want to imagine.

Yet look at the dollars-per-company in 2006: $45,608. Even if many of these are “weekend warriors,” that’s not a whole lot of electrical revenue, is it? The aggregate ($5.4 billion) sure is a big number, but when you get down to the personal level, $45,000 (before taxes) isn’t a gold mine.

How much of that went to material purchases? I don’t know, you don’t know, and the Census Bureau can’t tell us. However: These are the types of companies that will do installations without buying material (i.e., the homeowner buys the electrical “stuff” for an add-on room, these folks show up, install the stuff, and bill only for labor and miscellaneous materials).

Final note: In 2006, the Census survey claimed there were 2,543,239 companies in the construction industry with “nonemployer” status. They had $159 billion in sales.

Obviously, the electrical construction slice of this corner of the world is…tiny.

More Data on Contractors

There is a non-governmental source of data on ECs—Electrical Contractor magazine. I was publisher of the mag from July 1990 to May 1998. To see the research EC makes available to just anyone, go here.

I have a suspicion that there’s a lot of other data bouncing around inside EC somewhere. When I was publisher, this additional (in-depth) info was not widely disseminated and freely distributed. The guy doing the job now, John Maisel, probably still produces this additional data and controls where it goes.

Which is to say: Those companies advertising with EC probably can access even more research data on the market for the price of asking.

	Joe Salimando of EFJ Enterprises is a consultant, web content provider, and wordsmith based in Oakton, Va. To contact him, call 703-255-1428. See also The EleBlog.
Personal Disclaimer: The appearance of the ambling pachyderm is indicative of the writer’s obsession with elephants, not his political leanings.
IMPORTANT NOTE: THIS COLUMN REFLECTS ONLY THE OPINIONS OF ITS AUTHOR AND DOES NOT REFLECT THE OPINIONS OR POLICIES OF NAED, TED MAGAZINE, OR THE ADVERTISERS ON THE TEDMAG WEB SITE.