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Susan Hostetter
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New Economic Census Construction Report Shows More Than
164,000 Employed by Masonry and Stone Contractors Industry
California, Pennsylvania and Texas accounted for nearly one-fifth of the
estimated 164,236 people employed nationwide in the masonry and stone contractors
industry, according to the first in a series of reports from the 1997
Economic Census on construction industries released today on the Internet
by the Commerce Department's Census Bureau.
New York combined with California and Pennsylvania to make up nearly
one-fifth of the estimated $12.2 billion value of masonry and stone
contractor construction work.
About 63 percent of the nation's 22,614 masonry and stone contractor
employer establishments had between one and four employees. Although
establishments employing one to four workers constituted the majority,
they accounted for only 17 percent of the industry's $12.2 billion worth
of construction work.
The 1997 Economic Census was the first to use a new classification
system called the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS).
NAICS replaces the Standard Industrial Classification system begun 60
years ago.
"The United States developed the new system jointly with Canada and
Mexico to make it easier to compare data with its North American Free
Trade Agreement partners," said Census Bureau Associate Director for
Economic Programs Frederick Knickerbocker. "It is also easier to update so
that economic statistics keep pace with the nation's changing economy."
Statistics in this report, compiled from census questionnaires, come
from a sample designed to provide reliable estimates for each state and
each construction industry. The estimates for sampling error are provided
by the relative standard errors. These statistics are subject to
nonsampling errors from various sources, such as the inability to identify
all cases in the actual universe and classification errors.
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The U.S. Census Bureau, pre-eminent collector and disseminator of timely,
relevant and quality data about the people and the economy of the United
States, conducts a population and housing census every 10 years, an
economic census every five years and more than 100 demographic and
economic surveys every year, all of them evolving from the first census in
1790.
