Employment & Economics

Fast Facts

  • Chemical manufacturing is vital to America—our public health, national security, transition to clean energy, construction, manufacturing, transportation, agriculture, technology and innovation—and vital to U.S. economic leadership.

  • U.S. Chemistry is a $553 billion industry—one of America’s largest—and employs 542,000 Americans.

  • North America’s Building Trades Unions (NABTU) is an alliance of 14 national and international unions in the building and construction industry that collectively represent over 3 million skilled craft professionals in the United States and Canada.

  • NABTU provides essential coordination and support to the work of its affiliated national and international unions, in order for organized construction workers to achieve a powerful voice in government, in bargaining, and in their communities.

  • Every domestic chemical industry job generates 7.2 more jobs in the U.S. economy, totaling over 4.4 million jobs.

  • Each year, unions and their signatory contractor partners invest over $2 billion in private sector money to fund and operate over 1,900 apprenticeship training and education facilities across North America. These facilities train 71 percent of all construction apprentices and produce the safest, most highly trained and productive skilled craft workers found anywhere in the world.

  • The average annual pay in the business of chemistry is $86,000, which is 25 percent higher than the average manufacturing pay.

  • Companies participating in Responsible Care®, the global chemical industry’s world-class environmental and safety performance initiative, have a worker safety rate five times safer than the U.S. manufacturing sector as a whole and almost three times better than the business of chemistry overall.

  • The important work of NABTU is in the detail and the daily implementation of policy. That work revolves around three crucial hubs of activity: Legislative and Governmental Affairs; Field Services; and Labor-Management Relations.

  • The U.S. chemical industry is a major export sector, accounting for 14 percent of U.S goods exports.

  • U.S. chemical companies provide 14 percent of the world’s chemicals.