Noting that total labor force participation declined last month to just 62.2%, a U.S. Chamber of Commerce leader is urging Congress to update the country’s immigration system in order to get more workers into the country from other places. “The U.S. now has nearly double the number of open jobs than we have available workers,” Neil Bradley, executive vice-president of the Chamber, said in a statement. Also serving as chief policy officer for the group, Bradley remarked that the lack of available workers in the U.S. is unprecedented, characterizing it as an “extreme mismatch between open jobs and people to fill those jobs.” According to the latest numbers provided by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, more than 428,000 workers entered the market last month, but the number leaving came to around 363,000. “We hear from businesses every day that the worker shortage is their top challenge, and it’s impacting the country’s ability to ease supply chain disruptions, get inflation under control, and continue our economic recovery,” said Bradley. Altogether, it is thought that there is today a loss of some 3 million workers from where the nation’s workforce was in February 2020, the month before the Covid-19 economic shutdown. According to the BLS, there are now 5.6 million open jobs than people in the country who are looking for work. To tackle the problem, Bradley is urging Congress to “modernize our broken immigration system,” while also doing what it can to “expand affordable childcare options to help fill our 11.5 million open jobs.” BLS statistics show that the nation’s participation rate slowly climbed from 61.6% in the immediate months after the pandemic shutdown to 62.4% in January of this year, before dropping to the current 62.2%. According to a new report issued by the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, the labor participation rate for men has been on a slow decline for decades. But women workers in recent years have filled the gap, although their numbers, too, in the last year have been on the downside. The FED report adds in another factor to help explain the gap: age. The aging of the U.S. population has “increased the share of the population that is retired. As life expectancies have risen, the percentage of the U.S. population aged 60 and older, the most likely demographic to be retired, rose from 16% in 2000 to 24% in 2021.” By Garry Boulard
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