Posted on 03/17/2016 8:18:35 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
WASHINGTON — Surprise: America's discouraged workers are finding jobs — or so it seems. Unanticipated by many economists, this is good news for the country (and, assuming it continues, probably for Democrats this fall).
Ever since the Great Recession, economists have worried that the severity and length of the slump would forever consign many workers to the sidelines. Their prolonged disconnect from jobs would corrode their morale, contacts and job skills.
For years, the numbers seemed to confirm these fears. The labor-force participation rate — the share of Americans 16 and over with a job or looking for one — steadily declined. From January 2008 to September 2015, it dropped from 66.2 percent to 62.4 percent. Although this change may seem small, it represents a loss of about 6 million workers.
True, it's unclear how much resulted from the recession. A study by the White House Council of Economic Advisers estimated that about half the decline reflected the retirement of baby boomers. Other causes include long-standing trends: young people staying in school longer; low-income workers taking disability insurance. Still, the recession seemed a major contributor. Discouraged workers (generally, those who had looked for work in the past year and gave up) multiplied.
"The consensus of academic research," says economist Robert Gordon of Northwestern University, "was that these dropouts had departed permanently from the labor force." But the scholarly fatalism is now challenged. "It seems that the economy has succeeded in getting some of these discouraged workers back into the labor force," he says.
The latest numbers certainly suggest this. Since last fall, the labor-force participation rate has steadily risen. In the six months ending in February, the participation rate had climbed 0.5 percentage points to 62.9 percent.
(Excerpt) Read more at deseretnews.com ...
This is not true.
Aren’t most new jobs being taken by the recently immigrated? Maybe the writer is referring to discouraged foreign workers.
There are jobs.
Except that almost all of them are low wage service sector jobs, of which 80% are being filled by immigrant labor.
You dont need trump you idiots
Welcome to Obama's America-- where his people can claim a former $40K employee who has lost their job and been replaced by two $18K part-timers has DOUBLED the employment rate.
See how that jiggery-pokery works!
Would be nice if this was not the campaign season when news like this is always dredged up.
What would help would be economic news about the factories that have moved back from Mexico and China?
What types of jobs have these new workers found?
How is this connected to wage increases? There have been no wage increases as far as I know.
Robert Gordon of Northwestern University:
“Gordon graduated Magna Cum Laude with a B.A. from Harvard University in 1962. He then attended Oxford University and received his B.A. in 1964. He received his Ph.D. from MIT in 1967 with a dissertation titled Problems in the Measurement of Real Investment in the U.S. Private Economy”
All wonderful accomplishments I’m sure but when’s the last time he pumped his own gas or did his own grocery shopping for instance I wonder. Or had to look for employment for that matter.
The up turn IMO is the result of business thinking
a Republican will win the Presidency.
If a democrat wins, watch for it to flat line.
When will I get mine?
This is pure BS.
Great chart. The only reason wages haven’t declined even further is because the Bush Administration was only slightly less enthusiastic than the Obama Administration in flooding the labour market with third world immigrants.
Here in the NYC metro area wages are stagnant, and the $15 minimum wage nonsense is gaining traction because people working low-wage jobs end up in the same boat as Welfarians - just more tired.
Most Americans haven’t seen a real pay raise in years, and that exposes the “improving job market” hoax. In periods of genuine low unemployment, companies have to ante up to keep workers.
There is no upturn; wages would rise if there was really a tightening labor market. Many decent-paying jobs have left the US permanently, and there will be a long transition as they are replaced with jobs offering similar wages/standards of living.
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