By Taylor Maag, PPI’s Director of Workforce Policy
The start of 2023 presented some good news for America’s economic outlook. In the first week of January, the December jobs report was released, showing unemployment edging down to 3.5 percent with over 200,000 more people employed full-time. But even with this good news, an enduring conundrum remains: our country’s stagnant workforce participation rate.
The workforce participation rate represents the number of people working or actively looking for work. This job report showed that the U.S. labor participation rate is 62.3 percent, which has not changed since the beginning of 2022 and is only 1 percentage point higher than it was at the start of the pandemic. This means roughly 38 percent of Americans who could be working are detached from the labor market because they believe there are no jobs available for them, or they are facing personal challenges that make it hard to retain employment. As a result, these individuals have stopped looking for work altogether, leaving employers desperate for talent and policymakers wondering where everyone went.
