ORLANDO, Fla.,None — The Amway Center celebrated its debut over the weekend. WFTV reporter Greg Warmoth found out Monday why many of the hundreds of construction workers who helped build it may not even be able to afford a ticket to enjoy it.
The grand opening of the Amway Center was October 10, but not everyone is excited about its completion.
"Our work's over," unemployed construction worker Dennis Reagan said.
Reagan worked for $10.20 an hour on the Amway Center. On the morning after its opening night, the level-one journeyman was at Workforce Central Florida looking for a job that would even pay minimum wage.
"For any job that comes up, there are 200 or 300 applicants for," he said.
That wasn't the case a month ago.
The Amway Center was a huge employer, as was the addition to the Peabody Hotel on International Drive. Both opened within days of each other.
It took 1,200 temporary construction workers to build the Peabody Hotel expansion and another 2,500 to build the Amway Center. Now, with both big projects complete, those 3,700 people do not have another big project to go to.
"Those people will either be unemployed or have to go someplace else to seek employment, because the big projects are just not coming like they were," KEL construction company owner Phil Englett said. "There was a day when we had projects stacked up one behind the other, yes, several in the ground, several in permitting. That's not the case anymore."
There are 53,400 construction jobs in Central Florida, which sounds like a lot; but that's a 7.9 percent drop from a year ago.
"A lot of us are out of work, there's nothing," Reagan said.
The downtown Performing Arts Center's website says their upcoming project will employ up to 4,000 temporary workers, but it is not expected to break ground until the early part of 2011. For those out of work, they say it will be a long wait.
WFTV
