When President Obama took office, we were losing 700,000 jobs a month. Now we've had job growth for 24 consecutive months. And that was in 2012. How many months of job growth has Obama had by now? Amazing how great that man is.
minimum wage jobs, part time jobs, jobs for illegals----------yeah, obozo is really great.
ere are more job openings available in America today than at any point since the Bureau of Labor Statistics first started tracking vacancy data back in December 2000. Yet the percentage of adult Americans working or actively looking for a job stands at 62.6 percent, the lowest level in nearly four decades.
What gives?
It's a conundrum that has bedeviled economists and policymakers alike and is providing fresh fodder for politicians on both sides of the political aisle.
America's labor force participation storm has been brewing for years and reflects changing demographics as well as the results of policies that may have yielded unintended results.
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READ: The Problem With the Labor Department's Unemployment Indicators]
In a nutshell, the baby boomers have aged and are now finally retiring en masse. After bulging into the workplace in the 1970s, women are no longer the force in the labor market they once were. Younger people are opting to educate themselves rather than work. And a less-than-friendly tone toward immigrants is shrinking the supply for some high-skilled jobs.
All told, it's likely to be a drag on the U.S. economy for years to come.
The U.S. economy has created 11.5 million new jobs during the last 57 consecutive months of domestic labor force expansion. And there were nearly 5.4 million open jobs at the end of May – more than twice as many vacancies as there were six years ago.
And yet Americans are actually trickling out of work at an alarming rate. The country's labor force participation rate – which measures the share of Americans at least 16 years old who are either employed or actively looking for work – dipped last month to a
38-year low, clocking in at an underwhelming 62.6 percent.
Unemployed individuals who haven't actively looked for a job in the last four weeks, for any number of reasons, actually slip away from the Labor Department's
unemployment calculations. So although the unemployment rate ticked down to a seven-year low of 5.3 percent in June, that number didn't do justice to the 640,000 individuals who exited the labor market last month and the nearly 94 million people who were neither employed nor looking for work.
Righting the participation ship is far from an easy battle for a couple of reasons, the first of which is that labor force participation is a tricky concept. It's a little counter-intuitive, since the economy can add tens of thousands of jobs each month, yet the size of the overall labor market – and the population's overall participation rate – can shrink, which is what happened in June.
It's also tough to wrestle with because there are a lot of numbers at play. The monthly participation numbers fell further and faster during and in the aftermath of the Great Recession than they did at any other point in U.S. history. Labor force participation was as high as 66 percent when the recession began in December 2007.
"How do you attribute this drop in the participation rate? You want to say right off the top of your head, 'The participation rate started dropping sharply right at the beginning of the recession.' So that would make you think that it's mostly the weak economy," says Dan North, chief economist at Euler Hermes.
But participation had peaked years prior – hovering at 67.3 percent in the first four months of 2000 before beginning a gradual descent. The labor market managed to temporarily plug the leak in 2005 and 2006, but the country's participation rate had been in decline long before the U.S. economy hit a rough patch.