Discouraged Workers – Victoria Stillwell Comments

An interesting article written and published by Victoria Stillwell on 15 May 2014

Discouraged Workers

Economists Puzzle Over Labor Force Dropouts

Victoria Stillwell, May 15, 2014

Since the depths of the recession, more Americans are working and a steadily shrinking number are officially unemployed.  That’s good!  But there’s another category:  People who are neither working nor unemployed.  They’re just not looking for a job.  That number has stayed stubbornly high.  Not so good.  Or is it?  Economists are divided. It depends on why people aren’t working.  If a lot of them have given up looking for a job because they don’t think they can get a job, that can be a sign that times are tougher than the other statistics suggest.  If, on the other hand, more people are choosing to retire or staying in school longer, the outlook may be rosier.

The Situation

The share of Americans with a job or trying to find one fell steeply when the recession began and has stayed unusually low.  It’s been hovering around 63%, down from 66.4% in 2007 and in April it matched its lowest point in 36 years at 62.8%.  But the reasons it’s low have shifted, researchers say.  Soon after the downturn hit, large numbers of people felt so glum about their employment prospects that they stopped looking — becoming what economists tellingly call “discouraged workers.”   Usually, that group gets back in the game pretty quickly when the job market recovers.  That hasn’t happened.  Maybe that’s because the recession was unusually long, the recovery unusually slow and job searches unusually daunting.  The same thing is happening in Europe — in the countries using the euro there were 9,300,000 people available to work but not seeking employment in 2013.  There are also other factors at work, notably the aging of the baby boom generation.  One U.S. Federal Reserve paper credited retirements by older workers for as much as 80% of the decrease in labor force participation over the past 2 years.

The Background

Beginning in about 1965, labor-force participation started swelling as baby boomers started jobs, and then rose further as an increasing number of women untied their aprons and entered the workplace.  The labor force participation rate peaked at 67.3% in January 2000, right as the oldest baby boomers reached their last year in the prime working ages of 25 to 54.  Now, retirements are running at a far faster pace.  Surveys show that more older Americans are willing to work past 65 than a decade or two ago, but that group is still a minority.  And the size of the baby boom cohort means that the number who do retire will continue to drag down the share of Americans at work.  The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that by 2022 the labor-force participation rate will be down to 61.6%.

The Argument

It’s no surprise that the generation of younger workers succeeding retiring baby boomers is smaller.  The question being debated is whether the new reality of a smaller workforce should change the way economists judge how strong the economy is.  If shrinking workforce participation means the economy has less potential for growth than in the past — in effect, a lower speed limit — that’s an argument for policies like the Fed’s bond-buying to stimulate job creation.  If not, pumping in more money could cause inflation.  Either way, while the unemployment and job figures get more headlines when they’re released every month, the labor force participation rate remains a more important focus for economists looking for clues on the future pace of growth in the world’s largest economy.