Unemployment Is So 2009: Labor Shortage Gives Workers an Edge
And even as demand for workers accelerates across the United States, employers must contend with the unflinching force of demography: a work force
that is growing at its slowest pace in over a half-century, as baby boomers who joined the labor force from the 1960s to the 1980s now gradually age out of it.
The share of men in their prime working years — 25 to 54 — who are in the labor force has declined steadily since the end of World War II.
“After they leave the labor market,” he said, “people reorganize their lives.”
A third of the prime-age workers who have left the labor force are now receiving
disability benefits, meaning they are out for good, Professor Krueger estimated.
And with employers adding more than two million jobs a year, some economists suspect
that American workers — after being pummeled by a furious mix of globalization and automation, strangled by monetary policy that has restrained economic activity in the name of low inflation, and slapped around by government hostility toward unions and labor regulations — may finally be in for a break.
