With few places to turn, construction workers have colonized Craigslist as the cyberspace equivalent of the street corner or the Home Depot parking lot.


Some are getting more than they bargained for as they search for ad hoc jobs. One Palm Beach man who previously worked on crews renovating Walmart stores agreed to clean out an apartment after a tenant committed suicide. But he drew the line at hanging up a sex swing.


Still the plaintive pleas for work keep coming online. That is because carpenters, bricklayers, roofers, painters, electricians, plumbers and carpet installers have largely been left out of the economic recovery. Builders are not hiring, homeowners are deferring renovations and governments are postponing highway and bridge projects. Economists are forecasting that the Labor Department will announce on Friday that the nation’s employers added about 165,000 net jobs last month — few of them in the construction industry.


The jobs that construction workers find online tend to be small: painting bedrooms, replacing ceiling fans or even installing pet doors. The pay is skimpy, they say, far less than during the boom years. Mostly, though, there is simply not enough work for the large number of overqualified odd jobbers trying to cobble together a subsistence.


“You can follow the pulse of the economy just by watching what’s going on with Craigslist,” said Jerry Patterson, a carpenter in Phoenix who once had plentiful work framing new homes and remodeling older ones. “It’s a massive amount of people going for just a few amount of calls.”


Listings across the country, typos and all, capture the desperate effort to find even a tiny scrap of work.


“Trades man in South Florida for over 44 years ... For the time being not any job is to small,” reads one typical ad. In Las Vegas, one of the areas hardest hit by the housing collapse, a handyman writes: “30 Years of actual hard earned construction experience. / Skilled in almost every single trade. Las vegas native & Single dad in need of work.”


Unemployed people across many occupations are seeking work on Craigslist, of course. But while other industries are starting to improve and restore more formal jobs, construction remains on its knees.


According to the Labor Department, the construction industry slashed 2.27 million jobs from its prerecession peak to the trough of construction employment in January 2011. Just 95,000 jobs have returned, or less than 5 percent of those lost. With national unemployment at 8.2 percent in March, the rate among workers in construction and excavation, including drill operators and people who remove waste from building sites, is more than twice that, at 17 percent.


Manufacturers, by contrast, have restored 470,000 of the 2.29 million jobs they lost from the start of the recession to their low point. And retailers, who cut about 1.2 million jobs, have brought back 342,000 jobs, more than a quarter of those shed during the comparable period.


When work was easy to find in 2005 and 2006, Mr. Patterson, 43, struck out on his own. He would place an ad in the Sunday newspaper and get 30 calls, yielding at least three or four jobs. Now, he said, he puts an ad on Craigslist two or three times a day and is lucky to get two calls a week.


On his last job, he said, he and an assistant installed 12 windows on a house. After paying for materials, he said they cleared about $100 a day for the eight-day project.


“Everything has been so slow that you know, when you make some money, it’s just gone immediately trying to catch up on everything,” said Mr. Patterson, who added that he can cover his bills only because he shares a rental home with his girlfriend, who works in a hospice.


Some construction workers have left the industry. But “it’s been very hard for people to give up and move to other sectors because it’s not like there’s been a lot of expansion in other parts of the economy,” said Nik Theodore, an associate professor in the department of urban planning and policy at the University of Illinois at Chicago. “Most of what I’m hearing is people eking it out on the edge of the construction industry.”