Employers across the country in recent months have complained that they cannot find enough workers, despite an unemployment rate that remains higher than before the pandemic.
Not all workers may come rushing back as the pandemic recedes. Some older workers have probably retired. Other families may have discovered they can get by on one income or on fewer hours. That could allow labor shortages to persist longer than economists expect, Ben Casselman reports for The New York Times.
The simplest way to track the supply of available workers is the labor force participation rate, which reflects the share of adults either working or actively looking for work. Right now it shows plenty of workers available, although the Labor Department doesn’t provide breakdowns for specific industries.
Another approach is to look at the ratio of unemployed workers to job openings, which provides a rough measure of how easy it is for businesses to hire (or, conversely, how hard it is for workers to find jobs). Data from the Labor Department’s Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey comes out a month after the main employment report, but the career site Indeed releases weekly data on job openings that closely tracks the official figures.
Both those approaches have a flaw, however: People who want jobs but aren’t looking for work don’t count as unemployed. Constance L. Hunter, chief economist for the accounting firm KPMG, suggests a way around that problem: the number of involuntary part-time workers. If companies are struggling to find enough workers, they should be offering more hours to anyone who wants them, which should reduce the number of people working part time because they can’t find full-time work.
“The data is not necessarily going to be as informative as it would be in a normal recovery,” Ms. Hunter said. “I would not normally tell you coming out of a recession that I’m going to be closely watching involuntary part-time workers as a key indicator, but here we are.”
For all the latest Business News Click Here
For the latest news and updates, follow us on Google News.
Denial of responsibility! NewsBit.us is an automatic aggregator around the global media. All the content are available free on Internet. We have just arranged it in one platform for educational purpose only. In each content, the hyperlink to the primary source is specified. All trademarks belong to their rightful owners, all materials to their authors. If you are the owner of the content and do not want us to publish your materials on our website, please contact us by email – [email protected]. The content will be deleted within 24 hours.
