Employment-Population Ratio, Part Time Workers, Unemployed over 26 Weeks
[Via Calculated Risk]
Here are a few more graphs based on the employment report …
Employment-Population Ratio
The Employment-Population ratio ticked up slightly to 58.5% in February, after plunging since the start of the recession. This is about the same level as in 1983.
Click on graph for larger image in new window.
This graph shows the employment-population ratio; this is the ratio of employed Americans to the adult population.
Note: the graph doesn’t start at zero to better show the change.
The general upward trend from the early ’60s was mostly due to women entering the workforce.
The Labor Force Participation Rate increased slightly to 64.8% (the percentage of the working age population in the labor force). This is at the level of the early 80s.
[More]
We had a higher percentage of the US population employed in 1978 than we do now. Over 30 years of growth wiped out in about 3. It took us 20 years to reach our peak last time. employment for the next generation may well be slow unless we start really concentrating on doing some big things and making some hard choices.
And this graph from Calculated Risk is even more depressing. It looks at the percentage of job losses (relative to the peak employment levels) since the start of each recession:
Not only is this the deepest recession since WW2,, notice the shape of the curves. It is taking longer and longer to get back to the employment levels at the start of the recessions. 1981 took about 27 months to completely recover. 1990 took 31 months. 2007 took 47 months (almost 4 years!!).
I wonder why the recovery times are taking so much longer now? That is not a nice thing to see. I think the younger generation just now entering the job market are in for quite a few bad years.
Even if we do not do something to harm the recovery, it looks like it may take a very long time to get the job market back to what it was. Seems to me that something needs to be done to speed up the job recovery.
Even busy work for a couple of years might help a lot of people hold on until things get better and the job market picks up enough to take them. Otherwise we may doom a large number of people to unemployment for perhaps another 2 or more years.
