Shortages of labor. Restaurants forced to open only five days a week because they can’t hire enough staff. And the hardy chestnut, “They just don’t want to work,” and, doubling down, “They can make more in unemployment if they stay home, so they don’t want to work.”
Just like the comforting, simple explanations, “We lost all those jobs because of trade agreements” and “Social security would be fine “if Congress/Bush/Obama/pick your villain hadn’t stolen [very large sums of money] from the Trust Fund.” Simple. Easily identifiable “they” to blame. And wrong.
In fact, we’ve known about the looming labor force shortages for decades. And the problem extends beyond just your favorite restaurant’s inability to hire cooks and servers. The same numbers are hastening the days of reckoning for social security, worsening an inevitable attendance crisis for public schools and colleges, and threatening decades of Japanese style economic stagnation. And recent public policy decisions have made the situation far worse. And if we don’t rethink those decisions, the situation will do nothing but get worse.
As always, you can blame the most vilified generation ever, those evil Boomers. Simply, there are too many of us and, when we had our chance, we didn’t create enough little versions of us. Everyone knows this. Just as our demographic rule influenced everything in succession as we moved through our life cycles (“kid culture,” school capacity, college capacity, demand for homes, now, demand for retirement homes and medical services), so too has the demographic “bust:” remember those rounds of school closings in the mid-1980s, when the kids we didn’t have didn’t hit the system? Well, hello post-Boomer work force.
Work force
The number of people who could potentially be available to work is facing decades of decline. The working age population (15-64) declined starting in 2019 and will continue to decline for at least the next 20 years. The prime age group’s (25 to 54 years) share was 56.7 percent of the civilian non-institutional population in 1992, 56.1 percent in 2002, and 51.1 percent in 2012 and had declined to 48.1 percent of that population in 2022. At the other end, the 55-years-and-older age group increased its relative share of the civilian non-institutional population from 26.3 percent in 1992, to 27.6 percent in 2002, to 33.0 percent in 2012 and nearly 38.0 percent of that population in 2022.
More old people and fewer working age people equals a declining work force and a small labor base to support the growing number of retirees.
Labor force
The age cohorts just tell us the potential available to work. Many of them are out of the labor force (not either working or looking for a job) for any number of reasons. There always have been reasons that labor force participation is lower than 100%: retired, in school, providing childcare or health aid, unable to work for any reason, gave up looking.
Unsurprisingly, labor force participation rates have been sliding downward for decades. What’s significant, though, are the recent and future trends that will force the participation rate down further, especially in the recent aftermath of the pandemic: a surge of early retirements, more people staying home due to lack of childcare, reluctant to turn to work. With more retirements looming, no end of the child care crisis in sight, and the certainty that more children will have healthcare responsibilities for aging parents, the downward pressure on the labor force will accelerate.
Any babies born nine months from now won’t affect these numbers for decades. There are only two solutions. One: solve the healthcare and childcare problems so that the people now out of the labor forcer for these reasons can go back to work.
The second? Immigration. Yes, welcome to the stupidest, most short sighted, and self-destructive policy decision we’ve made in decades. For centuries, the energy of America came from its most recent arrivals. And purely because of cynical Republican politics, we’ve thrown away an advantage we had over the rest of the world. It’s by now well documented that the complacent and comfortable ones don’t make the difficult journey to get here; it’s the restless, ambitious ones and over the years they have been nothing but a benefit. Yet, bigoted politicians, Donald Trump worst of all, have turned them into criminals and welfare queens.
The result is devastating. The net number of people migrating to the United States in 2021 was the lowest in decades. On net, international migration added 247,000 people to the U.S. population between mid-2020 and mid-2021, according to Census Bureau estimates. This represents a substantial drop from the prior two years, when net migration was 568,000 (for the year ending July 1, 2019) and 477,000 (for the year ending July 1, 2020). The dramatic declines in the last two years were largely due to the pandemic, when migration in both directions was restricted for public health reasons and economic downturns limited the demand for workers. But the reductions in net immigration began prior to the pandemic, declining in every year since 2016, when net migration exceeded one million. In that time, we’ve cost ourselves more than 2 million. Until we fix this, we are doomed to decades of economic stagnation and job shortages.
This series is written to promote political discussion and organizing. Permission is given to use this in fact sheets, talking points, letters to the editor, etc. We’d appreciate if you notified Gettysburg DFA (leonsreed@gmail.com) of any uses. Written by Leon Reed.