Free Republic

Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell warned last month that raising interest rates to cool inflation is likely to dampen economic growth -- "and there will very likely be some softening of labor market conditions," he said. But there's no significant softening evident in Friday's jobs/employment report. On Friday, the Labor Department's Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the number of employed Americans in September rose by 204,000 to 158,936,000, a record high. The previous record, 158,735,000, was set in December 2019 when Donald Trump was president.

President Joe Biden’s pro-migration chief of homeland security is offering temporary residence and work permits to roughly 75,000 Ukrainian tourists, visa workers, and illegal migrants — including many young men — who are already in the United States. The award of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for 18 months was announced by Alejandro Mayorkas, the Cuban-born immigrant who runs the Department of Homeland Security:

Students enroll in college for a variety of reasons, and getting a better job is rated as a very important reason by 85% of them. One marker of a “good” job is earning enough to be able to repay student loans. But until recently, students were forced to guess which colleges and majors would fit that bill. While some information on earnings and debt was available, it was generally based on small and unrepresentative surveys or highly aggregated at the type of degree or the university level. But that changed last fall when the Department of Education began releasing the...

The labor force remains tight, wages are rising, and people are coming off the sidelines to find work, according to new data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ (BLS) monthly Employment Situation Report. Highlights from the report include: the unemployment rate remained at 3.5 percent, matching the lowest rate since May 1969; nonfarm job gains were 145,000, bringing 2019’s total to 2.1 million; the U-4, U-5, and U-6 alternative measures of labor underutilization were all at series lows; and the employment-population ratio for prime-age women increased 0.3 percentage points to 74.4 percent, which is 3.1 percentage points above the November...

Why are the people that quit looking for work keep increasing? I believed that Obama falsified this numbers to get he employment rates lower. Now I fully expected Trump to use the same measures om calculating the percentages, however why with a booming economy are these numbers increasing? From 2016: US unemployed have quit looking for jobs at a ‘frightening’ level: Survey: https://www.cnbc.com/2016/06/08/us-unemployed-have-quit-looking-for-jobs-at-a-frightening-level-survey.html "“not in the labor force” swelled by 664,000 to a record 94.7 million Americans, according to Labor Department data." The current numbers: 95,208 (Feb 2019) 95,577 (Mar 2019) 96,223 (Apr 2019)

A quarter-century ago, there were 56 teenagers in the labor force for every “limited service” restaurant — that is, the kind where you order at the counter. Today, there are fewer than half as many, which is a reflection both of teenagers’ decreasing work force participation and of the explosive growth in restaurants. But in an industry where cheap labor is an essential component in providing inexpensive food, a shortage of workers is changing the equation upon which fast-food places have long relied. This can be seen in rising wages, in a growth of incentives, and in the sometimes odd...

President Trump is proud of the 3.9% unemployment rate, the lowest since 2000. But it’s not as great as it sounds. Employers added 164,000 jobs in April, which was lower than forecasts but still okay. Employers have created an average of 200,000 new jobs each month so far in 2018, which is a strong pace of job growth. But the unemployment rate, which fell from 4.1% to 3.9%, is a puzzlement. There were fewer people looking for jobs in April, which means fewer people counted as unemployed. When unemployment falls because people get jobs, that’s good. But when unemployment falls...

The U.S. economy did more than give jobs to 313,000 in February — it brought nearly three times that amount off the sidelines, where more than 95 million Americans still sit. Inside the glittering nonfarm payrolls report the Bureau of Labor Statistics released Friday were some even more inspiring numbers. Skilled labor positions surged with big increases in construction and manufacturing, which has seen its best three-month period since 1984. On a bigger-picture level, there was even more. The labor force surged by 806,000, the biggest move since September 2003, and now sits just below 162 million. That's due to...

The economy added 261,000 jobs in October – the most since President Trump took office -- and the nation’s unemployment rate dropped another tenth of a point to 4.1 percent, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported on Friday. But a record number of Americans – 95,385,000 – were not in the labor force in October, and the critical labor force participation rate dropped four-tenths of a point to 62.7 percent, a disappointing show, as 76,500 Americans left the civilian labor force.

Labor Department's Bureau of Labor Statistics said the economy added 209,000 jobs in July; the number of employed people jumped by 345,000 to 153,513,000 in July, setting a third straight monthly record; the number of Americans counted as not in the labor force, meaning they don't have a job and are not looking for one, dropped for a third straight month to 94,657,000; and the nation's unemployment rate also dropped a tenth of a point, to 4.3 percent. The labor force participation rate.. was 62.9 percent in July, slightly better than it has been in recent months, but still close...

The unemployment rate declined to 4.5 percent in March, and total nonfarm payroll employment edged up by 98,000, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today.

It appears that the "animal spirits" unleashed by President Trump are not contained to the stock market: according to the BLS, one of the most notable observations to emerge from the February (and January) jobs reports is that the number of Americans no longer in the labor force plunged since December, declining by 736,000 in January (to a modest extent due to a data revision) and a further 176,000 in February to 94,190K. The combined two-month addition of 912,000 was the biggest drop in the "not in labor force" series on record. ... The 94,19 million people who are considered...

As the Trump administration continues to figure out ways to put people back to work, they have to deal with a simple demographic fact: there are tens of millions of American men, in the prime years of their working lives, who have dropped out of the labor force. It’s not that these men are trying, and failing, to get jobs. They’ve simply given up. What is causing this problem and what can be done about it? Nicholas Eberstadt explores this issue in "Men Without Work: The Invisible Crisis." Eberstadt is a long-time fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and one...

<p>They’re looking for work, out of the labor force but unhappy about it, or report working part-time when they’d prefer more hours, according to data released last week. Their plight comes even as the U.S. flirts with what economists consider the maximum level of employment for the first time since before the recession, having added 15.8 million jobs since the start of 2010. While some of America’s jobless are simply between gigs, those persistently stuck out of work are called the structurally unemployed.</p>

While Trump has personally expressed skepticism about the validity of the payrolls report, and especially the seasonally adjusted Establishment Survey, one aspect of the jos report he has been especially focused on is the number of people who are out of the labor force for economic reasons or otherwise: this is the infamous 95 million number that he brings up every time the strength of the "Obama recovery" has been mentioned. Which is why we are confident Trump will be happy to learn that in January, while the US economy added some 227K jobs according to the Establishment Survey,...

Barack Obama’s presidency began with a record number of Americans not in the labor force, and it's ending the same way. The final jobs report of the Obama presidency, released Friday, shows that the number of Americans not in the labor force has increased by 14,573,000 (18.09 percent) since January 2009, when Obama took office, continuing a long-term trend that began well before Obama was sworn in. In December, according to the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, a record 95,102,000 Americans were not in the labor force, 47,000 more than in November; and the labor force participation rate was...

This is arguably a crisis, but it is hardly ever discussed in the public square. Received wisdom holds that the U.S. is at or near “full employment.” Most readers have probably heard this, perhaps from the vice chairman of the Federal Reserve, who said in a speech last week that “it is a remarkable, and perhaps underappreciated, achievement that the economy has returned to near-full employment in a relatively short time after the Great Recession.” Near-full employment? In 2015 the work rate (the ratio of employment to population) for American males age 25 to 54 was 84.4%. That’s slightly lower...

The number of Americans not participating in the work force hit another record high in May, according to data released Friday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The BLS reports that last month 94,708,000 Americans were neither employed nor made an effort to find employment — due to discouragement, retirement, education, or otherwise — last month.

The number of Americans not in the labor force last month totaled 94,044,000, 562,000 more than in March -- and the labor force participation rate dropped to 62.8 percent (near a 38-year low), following four straight months of slight improvement. When President Obama took office in Janaury 2009, the labor force partipation rate was 65.7 percent, after hovering in the 66-67 percent range for much of the George W. Bush presidency. The recession inherited by the Obama administration officially ended in June 2009, but the labor force participation rate continued to drop during Obama's two terms, hitting 62.4 percent in...

The most recent data on California’s labor force participation rate (the percentage of California adults employed or looking for work) show the rate continuing to decline the past few years, even as job growth is very strong. Why is this? Should workforce practitioners and policymakers in California be concerned? How much does the rate represent increased discouragement among our workforce?Let’s start with the data, turning to EDD’s Labor Market Information Division. Mr. Brandon Hooker of the Division has compiled the chart above (click to enlarge) that tracks the declining labor force participation rate in California since December 2007. The rate...