How COVID-19 affected the manufacturing and construction industries?

The World Health Organization declared the COVID-19 outbreak a global pandemic in March 2020, demanding more than 66 million lives, while also affecting the global economy on every level and in every industry. Although the disease speeds up innovation in many areas including telecommunication, IT, and project management, there are industries employing blue-collar workforce, that are unable to issue home office for their workers. How does the manufacturing and construction industry adapt to this new world, and how can staffing companies support them?

Manufacturing Industry

As the US economy was on a clear route upwards, the increasing sales pulled the demand for manufacturing, from automotive to mobile devices to packaging. Production, storage, logistics, and supply chain companies were thriving, and the US manufacturing industry achieved a net worth of $6.2 trillion in 2019 - with great expectations for the following year.

As the Chinese COVID-19 outbreak became a global pandemic and reached the US, multiple factors affected and pulled back the sector’s performance:

National and international lockdowns: Although transportation was never stopped, decades of fine-tuning disappeared as the processes became significantly slower and less reliable.

Sick leaves: As manufacturing moves toward utilizing more Artificial Intelligence, especially in organizing work, predictions, and plans imploded as people started to became sick and had to stay home for their own and their colleagues’ sake.

Strict health regulations had to be introduced to avoid the internal spreading of the virus within the workplace, which required re-organizing factories, functions, and complete processes.


The above phenomena are true to the construction industry, which as being a less organized and automated industry, depends even more on human resources. The market is driven by financially strong and stable clients’ investments, which, as an effect of COVID-19, were either put on hold, postponed, or restructured in many cases.

According to the Associated General Contractors of America, nearly 40% of the US construction companies had to lay off a part of their staff due to the decreased demand for their services in the first month of the pandemic. Due to the nature of constructions, there is often no real way to introduce social distancing, which leads to even further tightening in the health protection regulations.

Staffing Support

One of the key takeaways of 2020 was that staffing gaps cannot be planned during crisis-times, leaving small- and medium-sized businesses vulnerable and generating hardship in even retaining existing deals and contracts.

This is where a manufacturing and construction industry-focused staffing company can help your business. Kingsman Staffing has an adequate-sized database capable of quickly mobilize the requested workforce to fill in the workforce gaps.

Your management does not need to worry about pre-employment testing, and background checks, as temporary hires by Kingsman Staffing are going through a strict assessment. You can always turn to us for staffing best practices, even when fulfilling governmental contracts.

Let us know if we can support you, and don’t hesitate to get in touch if you have any questions on how to deal with COVID-19 from an HR-perspective.