The coming job apocalypse

[mahatmakanejeeves]

The coming job apocalypse

By Harold Meyerson, Published: March 26

As a general rule, more Americans work than do the citizens of other advanced economies. Since the late 1970s, when the number of women in the workforce ballooned, the share of Americans who either had jobs or were trying to get one was greater than the share of comparable Europeans. For reasons good and bad — the higher availability of jobs, the need to bolster stagnating incomes, the linkage of jobs to health insurance — Americans worked like the dickens.

But that general rule may be changing. The percentage of working-age adults in the U.S. labor force began to decline in 2000, when it reached a peak of 67 percent. As of last month, it was down to 63 percent, which is lower than the level in the United Kingdom. Not since the late 1970s has Britain had a higher share of workforce participants than the United States.

Part of this decline is because of the retirement of aging boomers, but that explanation goes only so far. It doesn’t explain, for instance, why the workforce participation of Americans ages 25 to 34 has declined from 83.3 percent to 81.8 percent since 2007, as the Financial Times reported this week. Worse yet, the number of hours that working Americans are on the job is in decline, too. In the past six months, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data, the average workweek has shrunk from 34.5 hours to 34.2?hours — even as the official unemployment rate has dropped.

Anti-Obama partisans blame the president and his policies for the dwindling workforce, but the decline began in the last year of Bill Clinton’s presidency and continued through much of the presidency of George W. Bush. Clearly, either bipartisan public policy or something more fundamental than public policy is to blame.

The workforce participation rate is one of the data points in the monthly jobs reports released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics on the first Friday of every month.

Here you go: Table A-1. Employment status of the civilian population by sex and age

[TheNutcracker]

1. It takes policy 2 yrs to get into the pipeline. I'd say it's NAFTA, signed by Clinton

And look out for TPP!

[mbperrin]

2. Actually, it's good news. As participation drops,

wages for those remaining should rise.

IF we're not careful, a single breadwinner might actually be able to support a family again!

Oh. noooooooooooooooooooooo!!!