[Wyatt's Torch]

I pull these charts from the St. Louis Federal Reserve site which is the Fed's data warehouse also known as FRED. http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/ Claims and workforce participation are different sets of data and while related don't necessarily have that much to do with each other. The workforce participation issue is contentious because of the aging baby boomer population which has started to retire. Most people yell that the rate is collapsing but fail to mention that it has been significantly lower than this before:

The Baby Boomers are what fueled the massive growth in labor force participation which began in the 1960's as they started getting out of college. Now, 50 years later, they are starting to retire. What will be interesting to see is how the Millennial cohort (bigger than Baby Boomers and twice as big as Gen X) will impact the participation rate going forward. In some instances you have baby Boomers that are postponing retirement until later which squeezes out younger workers from taking their place. this will be interesting to watch.

[reed13k]

That’s an interesting take I was thinking it was driven by increased female participation during the same timeframe.