Media clips
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Getting back to square one isn’t much to celebrate, however. There are more than 6 million more working-age Americans2 today than when the recession began. Adjusting for population growth, we’re still millions of jobs short of where we were 6½ years ago — and have seen hardly any jobs recovery.3
FiveThirtyEight June 11, 2014 -
(Also in Htrnews)
The “labor force participation rate” — the share of the population that is working or looking for work — has dropped dramatically in the weak labor market of the Great Recession and its aftermath.Some of the drop has nothing to do with weak job opportunities; for example, during this period the Baby Boomers started hitting retirement age. But most of it does. In November 2007, one month before the recession officially began, the Bureau of Labor Statistics published labor force participation projections. The analysts did not know the recession was about to hit, but they could see coming demographic trends, so their projections capture what labor force participation would likely be today if the recession hadn’t happened.
USA Today June 11, 2014 -
The nation’s employers created a solid number of jobs last month that pushed the economy to a milestone: It finally recovered all 8.7 million jobs lost during the Great Recession.
But economists warned that it’s not time yet to break out the champagne for a labor market that has failed to keep up with population growth over the last 61/2 years and continues to struggle to create higher-wage jobs.
“Things are improving, but it’s happening agonizingly slowly,” said Heidi Shierholz, a labor market economist at the Economic Policy Institute.
The milestone also marks the recession, which officially ran from December 2007 to June 2009, as the deepest and the slowest to recover since the Great Depression.
McClatchy June 11, 2014 -
It’s hard to miss the stories celebrating the good news of the monthly jobs report from the Labor Department, like how in May the U.S. economy added more than 200,000 jobs for a fourth straight month and how the number of employed Americans reached an all-time high.
That the economy has recovered all jobs lost during the recession is “an economically meaningless benchmark,” though, since a continued recovery needs job growth to keep pace with population growth, according to Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington.
“We certainly have to pass that benchmark to get back to full employment, but passing that benchmark does not even come close to getting us there,” she said.
US News and World Report June 11, 2014 -
As Matt Yglesias reported just a few minutes ago, the US in May hit the number of jobs it had prior to the recession. That’s great news, but it only means we’ve climbed out of a massive hole. Had job growth continued unabated instead of being tanked by the recession, there would be millions more jobs, the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute reports today:
VOX June 11, 2014 -
Yet, this isn’t the moment to break out the champagne. Given population growth over the last four years, the economy still needs more jobs to truly return to a healthy place. How many more? A whopping 7 million, calculates Heidi Shierholz, an economist with the Economic Policy Institute.
President Obama’s administration was quick to point out that the recovery is still incomplete by their standards.
“We’re moving in the right direction, but we have a lot more work to do,” said Secretary of Labor Tom Perez. “There are way too many people who are still on the sidelines.”
As of May, about 3.4 million Americans had been unemployed for six months or more, and 7.3 million were stuck in part-time jobs although they wanted to work full-time. Both these numbers are still elevated compared to historic norms, and are of concern to Federal Reserve officials, who will meet in two weeks to re-evaluate their stimulus policies.
CNN Money June 11, 2014 -
If at least 98,000 positions were added in May, the total number of U.S. jobs would finally return to its level in December 2007, when the Great Recession began. Yet that’s hardly cause for celebration: The population has grown nearly 7 percent since then.
Economists at the liberal Economic Policy Institute estimate that 7 million more jobs would have been needed to keep up with population growth. Average wages, meanwhile, have grown just 2 percent a year since the recession ended, below the long-run average annual growth of about 3.5 percent.
Many economists predicted late last year that growth would finally pick up in 2014 from the steady but modest pace that has persisted for the past four years.
AP June 11, 2014 -
(Also in Money News, MSN Money, al, htrnews.com, dnj.com, WUSA9, Fox News, The Telegraph)
Some of that decline comes from an aging country in which more people are retiring. But the share of working adults among the overall population is “still bouncing around at the bottom where it was during the worst of the recession” — evidence that meaningful wage gains across the economy are unlikely, O’Keefe said.The recovery hasn’t kept up with the expanding U.S. population. Researchers at the liberal Economic Policy Institute estimate that 7 million more jobs would have been needed to keep up with population growth.
The pain has been concentrated largely among lower- and middle-income workers, according to an analysis by the institute.
AP June 11, 2014 -
(Also in The Republic, Epoch Times, The Salt Lake Tribune, The Boston Globe, Times Leader
There’s a flip side to that, though, Van Horn suggests: “As the economy gets stronger, as it continues to grow, eventually some of those discouraged workers will come back into the labor market, and we’ll have a higher labor-participation rate.”But that hasn’t happened — yet.
“We know that the reason unemployment is so high right now is pretty simple: employers haven’t seen demand for their stuff pick up in a way that would require them to bring on more workers, put that factory back on line, get more people to work,” said Heidi Shierholz, chief economist for the Economic Policy Institute, a labor-oriented Washington think-tank.
“It’s going to be this way for a while. We’re in a long slog,” Shierholz said, noting that the recession of 2007-2009 was the harshest downturn since the 1930s Great Depression.
AP June 11, 2014 -
Government payrolls have shrunk, taking middle class pay with them. Local school districts have 255,400 fewer employees. The U.S. Postal Service has shed 194,700 employees.
And during the economic recovery, more people have left the job market than entered it. Just 58.9 percent of working-age Americans have jobs, down from 62.7 percent at the start of the recession.
Some of that decline comes from an aging country in which more people are retiring. But the share of working adults among the overall population is “still bouncing around at the bottom where it was during the worst of the recession” — evidence that meaningful wage gains across the economy are unlikely, O’Keefe said.
The recovery hasn’t kept up with the expanding U.S. population. Researchers at the liberal Economic Policy Institute estimate that 7 million more jobs would have been needed to keep up with population growth.
The News-Gazette June 11, 2014