A wholesale reexamination of existing strategies and program administration is needed to enable individuals to pursue new opportunities and fuel the country’s economic growth. Federal and state governments are well positioned to serve as a catalyst for this effort by convening the right parties, aligning goals and incentives, and helping to scale promising efforts through … Continue reading
With unemployment at 3.8 percent, its lowest level in many years, the labor market seems healthy. But that number hides a perplexing anomaly: The percentage of men who are neither working nor looking for work has risen substantially over the past several decades. The issue, in economist’s jargon, is labor force participation. When the Bureau … Continue reading
A deeper examination of women and men’s labor market outcomes reveals another important way that gender disparities still manifest: the separation of men and women into different occupations. Women still tend to work in very different jobs than men, and occupational segregation has changed little over the last two decades, as shown in the figure … Continue reading
A smaller share of people in their prime working years (25-54) are employed now than in decades past, and some have wondered whether disabilities and health problems have played a role in that decline. People with disabilities have much lower employment rates than people without disabilities, and disabilities are one of the most commonly cited … Continue reading
Unstable work schedules are schedules in which the times of work vary and workers have little or no control over that variability, either as individuals or through collective agreements. These schedules are also often called “just-in-time” schedules. Their main attraction for employers is flexibility: the ability to respond to changes in demand and other contingencies, … Continue reading
Between 2004 and 2016, nearly 1.5 million foreign graduates of U.S. colleges and universities obtained authorization to remain and work in the U.S. through the federal government’s Optional Practical Training program (OPT). More than half (53%) of the foreign graduates approved for employment specialized in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields, according to a … Continue reading
In 2016, moms spent about 25 hours a week on paid work, compared with nine hours in 1965. At the same time, they spent 14 hours a week on child care, up from 10 hours a week in 1965. (Dads, too, are spending more time in child care than they were a half-century ago.) Seven-in-ten … Continue reading
Job creation is increasingly limited not by employers’ optimism or confidence or so-called animal spirits, but on the hard limit caused by the finite number of humans to fill those jobs. And so the focus of policy seems as if it should be less on creating more jobs and more on trying to make the … Continue reading
April jobs growth was modestly boosted by the weather effect. This is because the level of employment in the previous month was held down by unusually snowy weather in early March, whereas April was roughly in line with seasonal norms. The official BLS data show that employment growth picked up a little in April, from … Continue reading
Total nonfarm payroll employment increased by 164,000 in April, and the unemployment rate edged down to 3.9 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Job gains occurred in professional and business services, manufacturing, health care, and mining. Household Survey Data In April, the unemployment rate edged down to 3.9 percent, following 6 months … Continue reading
There has been growing speculation that a coming wave of innovation—indeed, a tsunami—powered by artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics, will disrupt labor markets, generate mass unemployment, and shift the few jobs that remain into the insecure “gig economy.” Kneejerk “solutions” from such technology Cassandras include ideas like taxing “robots” and implementing universal basic income for … Continue reading
In 2015, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, about 43.1 million people, or 13.5 percent of the nation’s population, lived below the official poverty level.1 (See the technical notes section for examples of poverty levels.) Although the poor were primarily children and adults who had not participated in the labor force during the year, 8.6 … Continue reading
More than one-in-three American labor force participants (35%) are Millennials, making them the largest generation in the U.S. labor force, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data. As of 2017 – the most recent year for which data are available – 56 million Millennials (those ages 21 to 36 in … Continue reading
Using data from the LinkedIn Economic Graph, our new skills gaps analytics can identify and quantify skills gaps at scale to help professionals and employers plan for the future. So what exactly is the data telling us? This may come as no surprise, but there’s a shortage of professionals with some of the most in-demand … Continue reading
More than 2,000 demographers are in Denver this week for the Population Association of America’s annual meeting, where they will discuss topics ranging from the changing family to international migration flows. Ahead of the meeting, here are some important recent demographic findings from Pew Research Center: Millennials are projected to outnumber Baby Boomers next year. … Continue reading