August 7,2015
the staff of the Ridgewood blog
Ridgewood NJ, The number of people not in the labor force reached another record high in July, according to new jobs data released Friday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The BLS reports that 93,770,000 people (16 and older) were neither employed last month nor had made specific efforts to find work in the prior four weeks.This is an increase of 144,000 over June’s record when 93,626,000 were not in the workforce.
labor force participation rate remained the the same as June at 62.6 percent. Before last month the labor force participation rate had not been that low since October 1977, when the participation rate was 62.4 percent .Despite hovering near the 38 year low. the unemployment rate remained at 5.3 percent suggesting more people were searching for jobs during the 1970’s and the incentive not to work was not as high.
Just how many of these unemployed are in school ,retired,sick or handicapped and unable to work. This number has always been misleading.
There have always been those among us who can’t work for the reasons you have stated, but the problem is, the percentage of non-workers has grown, and is growing to such. An extent that it is effecting the economy while costing the Government billions in various forms of dole. It all comes down to people being incentivized to work. if you make the multiple forms of dole easier to get, people will not work, or they will supplement their dole with off-the-books work.