Construction Is a Hard Job. The Retirement Gap for Hispanic Workers Makes It Harder.

Union construction workers have median retirement savings four times higher than non-union construction workers (Source: Center for American Progress, 2023). Hispanic construction workers are disproportionately non-union, and 40% of Hispanic construction workers have no employer-sponsored retirement plan at all (Source: HCC Workforce Wellbeing Survey 2025). The physical demands of construction work accelerate the timeline to retirement, often by a decade relative to office workers. The combination creates a retirement crisis that is building in slow motion.

I want to start with a specific person, because the numbers are easier to absorb when they are attached to a real situation.

The retirement savings crisis in construction disproportionately affects Hispanic workers. Only 28% of construction workers have access to an employer-sponsored retirement plan, compared to 56% of all private sector workers (Source: BLS National Compensation Survey, 2024).

I sat with a 58-year-old concrete finisher in San Antonio last year. My interpreter helped us communicate. He had been in construction for 31 years. He had no retirement savings. Not because he had not earned enough to save, but because no employer he had worked for in 31 years had offered him a retirement plan. I asked him what he planned to do at 65. He said he planned to keep working. That answer is the retirement crisis in construction. It is not a data problem. It is a structural failure that I think about every time I see the aggregate statistics.

The Roofer Who Has Been Working Since He Was Eighteen

I met a roofer in his late 50s at an HCC event in San Antonio. He had been on roofs since he was eighteen. He told me that without blinking, the way you might say you have lived in the same city your whole life. He had been a laborer, then a journeyman, then a crew lead. He had run his own crew for the last fifteen years. Good reputation. Steady work. He figured he had installed more square footage of roofing than almost anyone in the city.

I asked him about retirement. He laughed, not bitterly, but the way people laugh when you ask about something they have made peace with not having. He told me he had a truck, some tools, and a house he was still paying off. That was his retirement.

He was not a failure. He had worked hard, paid taxes, raised a family, and built something. But the system had not built anything for him.

What a Union Pension Actually Provides vs. What a Non-Union Worker Faces

This is where the four-times gap becomes concrete. A union ironworker or electrician who works a full career has contributions flowing into a defined-benefit pension fund from every hour worked. At retirement, that fund pays a monthly benefit for life, regardless of market performance, regardless of whether the worker made good investment decisions. Ironworkers National Pension Fund benefits for long-career members can reach $3,000 to $4,000 per month.

A non-union roofer who worked the same number of years has nothing automatically accumulating. If they did not open an IRA or a solo 401k, which most did not because no employer was prompting them and the administrative overhead of doing it yourself is not trivial, they have what they saved in a checking account and whatever equity exists in their home.

The Social Security Gap for Informal Workers

This is the piece of the retirement story that I find most troubling, because it is largely invisible until it hits.

Social Security benefits are calculated based on your 35 highest earning years of reported wages. Workers who spent years in informal or cash employment have those years show up as zero in the Social Security Administration's calculation. A worker with 40 years of physical labor might have 15 to 20 years of recorded Social Security contributions and 20 years of gaps, because a significant portion of their early career was paid in cash.

Hispanic workers receive an average of $1,200 per month in Social Security benefits versus a $1,650 per month average (Source: Social Security Administration, 2024). That $450 per month gap, over 20 years of retirement, is $108,000 in lost income. For a worker who has no pension and no retirement account, Social Security is the only income source. The gaps in it are not recoverable.

What 87 Cents on the Dollar Means Over a Career

The wage gap compounds into retirement in ways that are worth spelling out. If a Hispanic construction worker earns 87 cents for every dollar a comparable non-Hispanic worker earns over a 35-year career, the difference in total earned income is substantial. On a salary basis, assume a non-Hispanic worker earns $65,000 per year and a Hispanic worker earns $56,550 per year in the same role. The annual gap is $8,450. Over 35 years, that is $295,750 in lower lifetime earnings, assuming no compounding. When you factor in the lost investment returns on that money had it been saved, the number grows significantly. That is not just a wage equity issue. It is a retirement security issue.

Which Trades Have the Worst Retirement Gaps

The retirement gap is not uniform across construction trades. Ironworkers, electricians, and plumbers and pipefitters who work union have strong defined-benefit pensions. The trades with the worst retirement outcomes are concentrated in the non-union, labor-intensive segments: roofing, concrete, masonry, and residential framing. These are trades with high Hispanic workforce concentrations and low union penetration.

A roofer or concrete worker who spends 35 years in non-union work is operating entirely outside the pension system. They are also in trades where the physical deterioration of joints, back, and knees often forces retirement before age 60, compressing the window for late-career savings while also shortening the retirement period those savings need to cover.

What Multiple Employer Plans Are and Why They Matter

The SECURE Act 2.0, passed in 2022, significantly expanded access to Multiple Employer Plans for small businesses. An MEP allows multiple unrelated employers to participate in a single retirement plan, spreading the administrative costs that make individual small-employer retirement plans prohibitively expensive. For small Hispanic construction contractors with one to fifteen employees, MEPs are the most viable path to offering retirement benefits.

HCC is actively working with MEP administrators to build a construction industry MEP specifically designed for small Hispanic-owned firms. The goal is to make offering a retirement plan as simple as adding an insurance policy, with Spanish-language enrollment materials and a cost structure that works for firms billing under $3 million per year.

A Coming Public Policy Crisis

The roofer I met in San Antonio is not alone. He represents tens of thousands of Hispanic construction workers who are within a decade of retirement age with no retirement savings. When they stop working, because their bodies require it or because the work dries up, they will be dependent on Social Security payments that reflect incomplete work histories, family support, and public assistance programs. The cost of that outcome, in human terms and in public program expenditure, is going to be significant. Starting to address it now, through MEP expansion, wage theft enforcement that increases reported wages, and Spanish-language retirement literacy programs, is far cheaper than managing the crisis after it arrives.