They said they saw no clear explanation for that in the
data, but suggested it might reflect "a broad-based
re-evaluation regarding the balance people with to strike
between their work and personal lives."
(Reporting by Howard Schneider; Editing by Will Dunham)
By Howard Schneider
WASHINGTON, March 29 (Reuters) - Almost all of the
remaining shortfall in U.S. labor force participation is the
result of demographic and other trends that predate the COVID-19
pandemic, according to new research that suggests little chance
that growth in the number of workers will help ease a tight
American job market.
After accounting for factors such as population aging and
changes in education that influence people's willingness to
work, the study showed that U.S. labor force participation was
only about 0.3 percentage points short of where it would have
been without the pandemic - equivalent to around 700,000
"missing" workers.
"Much of the decline in labor force participation over the
past three years should have been anticipated even absent the
pandemic," Katharine Abraham, a University of Maryland economics
professor and former U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
commissioner, and Lea Rendell, a University of Maryland doctoral
candidate, wrote in a study released late on Wednesday in
conjunction with a conference at the Brookings Institution think
tank.
They attribute the remaining gap largely to fear of COVID or
the lingering impact of "long COVID" illness, though they say
their numbers, far below what some other studies have found,
were "very much in the nature of guesstimates" given the
difficulties of pinning down a precise motivation for why people
left the workforce.
Still, the figures suggest a winnowing down of COVID-related
impacts on the labor force, a significant conclusion for U.S.
policymakers hoping labor force participation rates could
rebound to pre-pandemic levels.
As of February, about 62.5% of U.S. adults were either
working or looking for work, 0.8 percentage points below where
it was in February of 2020, according to government figures.
It has been in a steady decline for nearly a quarter century
after peaking at 67.3% in April 2000. After a dramatic drop of
more than 3 percentage points at the start of the pandemic,
Federal Reserve policymakers have hoped the participation rate
would both recover to its early 2020 level and regain some of
the same dynamics that had begun to drive it higher.
It appears instead to have stalled at just above 62%.
Even absent pandemic impacts that Abraham and Rendell said
may be sidelining around 1.2 million workers, the number of open
jobs, at 10.8 million, remains far above the nation's supply of
potential workers.
Another drag: The average hours worked per week fell by
about 36 minutes per person from January 2020 through the end of
2022, a decline they said equates to the loss of about 2.4
million people.
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