Rob Garver:
t seems almost ungrateful to complain about the announcement that the U.S. added 223,000 jobs to the economy in April, dropping the official unemployment rate to 5.4 percent, particularly after the dismal showing in March. Economists saw those numbers as reason for a “sigh of relief,” as one put it. But the truth is that for many American workers, the jobs recovery hasn’t yet provided real relief — and there is still a lot of ground to cover before the country can be said to have truly recovered the losses from the Great Recession.
The labor force participation rate remains considerably lower than it was prior to the recession, and while that has something to do with baby boomers retiring, the demographic changes don’t account for everything. As this chart from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute in Washington shows, there are still fewer Americans of prime working age in the labor force now, on a percentage basis, than there were at the start of the recession.
Economist Jared Bernstein, a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, writes that the labor force participation rate, now at 62.8 percent, appears to have stabilized in the neighborhood of 63 percent. Factoring in a growing population, that flattening out could be seen as a positive.
“That’s better than a declining rate—at least some of the decline was driven by labor-force leavers discouraged by their job prospects,” he writes. “But most analysts, myself included, believe there’s considerably room for the lfpr to tick up as labor demand returns. The reason this matters—why it’s actually a big deal—is that this dynamic means there’s more slack in the job market than the relatively low unemployment rate suggests.”
Interestingly, the U.S. remains dramatically below other developed countries in the employment level of prime-working-age people, including countries that failed to weather the recession as well as the U.S. “The United States is doing far worse in employing prime age workers than its competitors,” said economist Dean Baker of the progressive Center for Economic and Policy Research.
And, as has become her habit on jobs day each month, EPI economist Elise Gould points out that we can take only so much comfort in the fact that the economy has trundled its way back to the same absolute number of jobs it has prior to the recession. That’s because population growth means we need millions more jobs to make up for the growth in working age population since then.
The labor force has virtually no representation in Congress. Even the unions (and as a result Democrats in Congress) have turned their back on US workers in favor of open borders and socialist agendas, and the middle class certainly has no support by the establishment Republican Leadership.