The above photo was from the summer of 2021, in Dollywood, which is by all accounts a pretty great place to work in East Tennessee. Remember the great labor shortage caused by all those fat stimulus checks? The THIRD round of stimulus checks had gone out in the late spring of 2021, and made lower-paying and entry-level jobs even less competitive a choice – hang out and enjoy the free cash from other US taxpayers, or bust a gut to bring in about the same amount of money? So here we are, almost exactly 3 years later… and quit rates have slowed but remain high.
A few days ago, the US Chamber of Commerce published a report about this issue: https://www.uschamber.com/workforce/understanding-americas-labor-shortage-the-most-impacted-industries “In 2022, more than 50 million workers quit their jobs, following the 47.8 million who did so in 2021. In 2023, this trend gradually subsided, with 30.5 million workers resigning as of August.”
The labor force participation rate is still lower than what would have been forecasted had there been no Chinese-created Covid-19 pandemic. Even the left-leaning Brookings Institution wondered about this trend – https://www.brookings.edu/articles/why-havent-workers-returned-to-the-labor-force-after-covid-19/ but didn’t come to any good conclusions.
One point the lost liberals will try to make is that, well, our workforce is aging, so some of the decline in labor force participation is due to our aging demographic – basically, older workers are retiring. The problem with this is that the labor force participation rate is a percentage. In May 2004, it was 66.1%, in December 2019, it was 63.3% and in May of 2024 is only 62.5% for all adults.
But when you dig down and look at the charts broken into age bands, you see that the biggest losses are not in the upper bands – in fact, the labor force participation rate has risen for some age bands of older adults which is especially surprising as this data is from 2022, post-Covid. Looking back at a 20 year period, the percentage of people ages 55 and older working has increased overall by 4.3%. BUT, the biggest decline is in the age 16-19 year old age band. Almost 50% of teens were working (47.4%) back in 2002. But as of 2022, only 36.8% of teens are working.
We’ll discuss the reasons for this in another post.
Data source: https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/civilian-labor-force-participation-rate.htm