As I continue to play catch up, I found this tidbit from Calculated Risk that digs deeper into last week's unemployment numbers. The news doesn't get better.
In the 1960's women entered the workforce, in the 1970's there was lots of fluctuation in the Employment-Population ratio (percentage of the population in the workforce.) The 1980's saw a growth in this ratio of 6 percentage points from 57% to 63%. And during the last 20 years or so, it has revolved around 62%. Now we're back to the 58.5% we saw in the 1980's.
The trend has been for people to return to the workforce anywhere from six months to a year after the recession has been declared over. So once three to four percent of the population decide to return to the workforce, there will be that many more people looking for a job. It's not necessarily a correlation that the unemployment rate will rise by that much, but it probably will rise.
Roughly calculated, the percentage of part-time workers as a percentage of the number employed is one percent higher in the 1980's - more evidence that the unemployment rate is undercounting what's really going on in the labor market.
And retail sales and hiring are basically flat since last year, so don't expect an end of the year/Christmas bonus that will make things better.
Happy Tuesday morning (8min left on the west coast 'til afternoon.)
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