The Patriot Post® · Workers in Their Prime Return to Job Market
The current occupant of the White House has claimed the job market is booming and that he’s created more jobs than previous occupants of the office. Given that he took over at a time when we were climbing out of a pandemic-induced hole, he can cherry-pick and fool some folks. But the real question is why people are returning to work.
A recent piece in The Wall Street Journal could have part of the answer: “The labor-force participation rate for prime-age women was the highest on record, 77.8% in June. That is well up from 73.5% in April 2020.” That timing is important because, as the WSJ noted earlier this year: “The onset of Covid-19 and social-distancing measures in early 2020 struck female-dominated jobs in services that require close personal contact, such as housekeepers, nurses and daycare instructors. Many mothers in white-collar jobs also left the workforce to care for their children after schools moved to remote instruction.”
Now they’re back, and they’re joined by enough men to finally bring the total number employed to roughly pre-pandemic levels, adjusted for population growth.
The aspect of population growth is the subject of yet another WSJ editorial. The Journal’s editors argue that, due to declining birth rates among American women of child-bearing age, we need to import our future workforce. Claiming we may need as many as six million foreign-born workers by 2040 to make up for a lack of domestic-born working-aged people, the editorial helpfully adds that half our job growth between January 2021 and May 2023 came from an influx of foreign workers.
The WSJ piece leans heavily on research by Madeline Zavodny, a Research Fellow at the National Foundation for American Policy, a pro-immigration Beltway think tank. In the executive summary of her report, Zavodny contends: “Without continued net inflows of immigrants, the U.S. working-age population will shrink over the next two decades and by 2040, the United States will have over 6 million fewer working-age people than in 2022. Announcements of high-profile layoffs and concerns about the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) obscure America’s continuing need for additional workers at the top and bottom of the skill distribution. International migration is the only potential source of growth in the U.S. working-age population in the coming years.”
Yet here we are, dealing with an influx of foreign workers who come without permission thanks to the open-border policy of the Biden administration. Unfortunately, they seem to be concentrated at the bottom of the “skill distribution,” which denies opportunities to the few younger workers we have entering the job market.
Finally, there’s simple Bidenomics. Overall employment rolls are filling in part because families are trying to keep up with inflation. The double-digit increase in prices since the opening days of the Biden regime has taken its toll on family budgets, certainly forcing some moms who were previously happy to stay home and take care of the kids into the job market. Obviously, that would cause their labor force participation number to spike.
It’s hard enough to predict what will happen next week in America, let alone the employment market in 17 years. While it’s good that more Americans are working, the real key is allowing them to prosper while doing it. Thanks to the not-so-enlightened statesmen at the helm, that’s where we are sorely lacking right now.