NEW YORK CITY-There’s more bad news about construction in the city, this time courtesy the New York Building Congress, whose analysis of New York State Dept. of Labor employment statistics demonstrates a sharp drop in construction employment.

The NYBC had previously released daunting numbers for 2010 construction spending--down 12% for the year, to $23.7 billion. Now the group says that employment numbers are down as well. For the first quarter of 2011, construction employment fell to 101,200, which marks the lowest level since the second quarter of 1998.

Compared to the Q1 2008, when construction employment was at 128,300, there has been a whopping 21% drop. The numbers reflect those workers on payroll, and make no distinction between union and non-union workers, NYBC president Richard T. Anderson tells GlobeSt.com.

“The impact of residential and commercial construction declines has been greater than we anticipated,” Anderson says. “We thought that we might be down to the 110,000 range and to go down to 101,000--the lowest level in 13 years--was more than we expected.”

Anderson says that the gradual slowdown in public sector work in the city is driving much of the slowdown, Making matters worse is an already sluggish private sector. “Public sector work is starting to slip, although it is still at a relatively high level,” Anderson says. “But the residential and commercial employment has plummeted and the only part of the private sector construction market that’s performing is institutional work--at colleges and medical facilities.”

Anderson says that a recent Regional Plan Association study that asserts that the decline in union construction jobs might be a function of the unions pricing themselves, and their workers, out of the market, is merely pointing out the realities of doing business in the highest cost construction market in the US.

Hope Cohen, who co-authored the RPA study, says that she is not at all surprised by the numbers. "It's the context in which our report comes out," Cohen tells GlobeSt.com. "The numbers thrown around the construction industry are around 30% unemployment among union construction workers."

Anderson says it's about the high cost of doing business in the city. “We are high cost because everything in New York costs more, compounded by the fact that we have some very costly work rules, under 72 different union agreements that need to be rationalized,” he says. “I think everyone throughout the industry recognizes the need for us to be more efficient, but this has to be resolved at the collective bargaining table.”