“It’s Not a Skilled Labor Shortage — It’s a Job Shortage,” Says Washington’s Building Trades Council
The narrative that Washington simply doesn’t have enough skilled construction workers is, according to the people who train and represent that workforce, backwards.
Heather Kurtenbach, executive secretary of the Washington State Building and Construction Trades Council — which represents 48 building trades unions statewide — laid out the counter-argument in a column earlier this year. At the end of 2025, with only 75% of affiliated unions reporting, nearly 9,955 union construction workers in Washington were out of work. That figure includes more than 1,700 apprentices who are still working to complete required training hours but can’t get dispatched to job sites. On top of that, more than 8,000 Washingtonians are on waiting lists to get into union construction apprenticeship programs in the first place.
Kurtenbach’s argument: you don’t end up with nearly 10,000 skilled workers out of work and 8,000-plus waiting to start an apprenticeship because there’s a shortage of skilled people. You end up with those numbers when the job pipeline itself dries up. Apprenticeship programs depend on consistent work to responsibly bring in new applicants — when apprentices can’t get the hours they need, programs can’t expand, regardless of how much interest exists.
This directly complicates the “skilled labor shortage” framing that’s dominated national construction workforce coverage this year, including reporting NW Construction News has covered on immigration enforcement’s impact on the labor pipeline. Both dynamics may be true simultaneously: a genuine shortage of workers in some trades and regions, alongside underemployment and dispatch bottlenecks in others.
Why this matters for contractors: If your firm is struggling to find workers while union halls report thousands on out-of-work and waitlist rolls, the mismatch is worth investigating directly — it may point to a dispatch, geography, or wage-competitiveness problem rather than a pure supply problem. For firms that do have consistent work to offer, this is a moment when experienced union labor may be more available than the “shortage” headlines suggest.
Sources: Tri-Cities Area Journal of Business (Heather Kurtenbach column); Washington State Building and Construction Trades Council
