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REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS
Americans Leaving Work Force Reaches Record High in October
Tuesday, November 12, 2013 3:41 PM
JONGSSTRAW
Quote:A record high number of Americans — 91,541,000 — have left the U.S. labor force, making it the lowest worker participation rate since 1978. Citing the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Daily Caller reported Tuesday that 932,000 Americans left the labor force in October, making it the biggest decrease in one month since 2009. When President Barack Obama began his first term in January of that year, the labor participation rate was 65.7 percent at 80,507,000, meaning that moe than 11 million Americans have left the work force during his presidency, due primarily to the recession. Participation rate is now at 62.8 percent. If the trend continues, the number of people not participating in the labor force will exceed the number of employed Americans in approximately four years. The Washington Post cites the government shutdown, retiring baby boomers, workers opting for school over jobs, and the number of workers increasingly going on disability insurance as opposed to unemployment as all contributing factors to the shrinking labor force. The smaller labor pool also suggests that the economy may be worse off than the official unemployment rate of 7.2 percent indicates, since unemployed figures do not include people who have left the labor market altogether.
Tuesday, November 12, 2013 7:05 PM
NIKI2
Gettin' old, but still a hippie at heart...
Quote:Baby Boomers, Not Recession, Behind Drop In Workforce To hear some economists tell it, the prolonged recession has caused millions of Americans to leave the labor force. Perhaps though there’s another story there. Maybe it’s just the baby boomers. Baby boomers, the generation born between 1946 and 1964, started reaching the conventional retirement age, 65, last year. That would certainly have many of them leaving their jobs and heading toward the doors. It’s their exit from the labor force that could explain why the labor-force participation rate has fallen from 66% at the end of 2007 to near 63.9% today, a group of Barclays Capital economists argue in a new report. http://www.forbes.com/sites/abrambrown/2012/03/02/baby-boomers-not-recession-lowering-labor-force-participation/]
Quote:The Unemployment Paradox: Why the Conventional Wisdom About Job Seekers Is Wrong The macro-economic team at Barclays ran models showing that demographics, and especially retirement amongst baby boomers, has played a larger role in pushing the labor participation rate down than other factors have. “Only about a third of the drop in the labor force participation rate is accounted for by those who say they want a job, and only about 15% by those who want a job and are also of prime working age – i.e., between 25-54,” says the report issued Thursday. http://business.time.com/2012/03/02/the-unemployment-paradox-could-a-better-economy-make-jobless-rates-worse/]
Quote:...due to structural factors (in particular, baby boomers retiring... http://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/economic-intelligence/2012/03/13/labor-force-participation-skewing-unemployment-numbers]
Quote:"Study: older workers are exiting fast, shrinking the labor force", http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2012/03/07/141102/older-workers-are-exiting-fast.html]
Quote:America’s work force will soon experience significant changes as the oldest baby boomers celebrate their 65th birthdays this year. According to the Oregon Employment Law Letter, nearly 70 million people will retire within the next decade which guarantees massive impacts on several industries across the country. http://www.omnione.com/baby-boomers-leaving-the-workplace/]
Quote:"Labor force projections to 2014: retiring boomers"; The baby boomers’ exit from the prime-aged workforce and their movement into older age groups will lower the overall labor force participation rate, leading to a slowdown in the growth of the labor force. http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2005/11/art3full.pdf
Tuesday, November 12, 2013 7:19 PM
Quote:The Washington Post cites the government shutdown, retiring baby boomers, workers opting for school over jobs, and the number of workers increasingly going on disability insurance as opposed to unemployment as all contributing factors to the shrinking labor force
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