The estimates aren’t in for next week’s non-farm payrolls report just yet but you can bet that labor force participation will be a critical question. The 63.0% rate is well below the 66.4% pre-recession level and not all of it can be explained by demographics.
The FiveThirtyEight blog looks at the millions US workers who are missing from the jobs market, why and what it means:
Our final tally, then, is that 2 to 4 million of our original 8 million “missing workers” might return to the labor force as the economy improves. That’s a lot of people: If all of them were considered unemployed, the unemployment rate would now stand at between 7.8 percent and 9 percent, down significantly from the worst of the recession, but high enough to suggest an economy that is still far from fully healed.
