Some 20 months after the Federal Reserve started pumping money to deal with a developing crisis in the U.S. banking system in September 2019 — and the brief “Trump jobs boom” ended — about 25 million members of the American labor force are unemployed or misemployed, 15% of the total labor force of close to 170 million. The May Employment Report released by the Labor Department this morning breaks this down: 9.3 million are officially unemployed; 6.6 million are “not in the labor force but wanting a job” (or put another way, needing a job but not actively seeking one); 5.3 million are in forced part-time work. Not reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), approximately another 3.5 million Americans who are eligible to work dropped out of the labor force more than one year ago, or have never entered it despite coming of age to do so.
While the economy is continuing to add about 1 million, mostly service jobs per month this spring (forget the publicized “headline” numbers), there are still 5.7 million fewer employed than there were in February 2020, and 700,000 fewer employed in productive or “goods-producing” jobs.
Most telling: The labor force participation rate at 61.1% is 1.7 percentage points lower than in February 2020; and the employment-population ratio of 58.0% is still 3.1 percentage points below its February 2020 level.
Weekly average wages remain about 2% below their pre-pandemic level despite higher average wages, because of lost hours of work.
This is what the workforce has to show for a year or so of $6 trillion in authorized Congressional spending for “relief” and another $4 trillion in Federal Reserve creation of new reserves for the Wall Street (and City of London/Frankfurt) banks, all without any creation of productivity or productive employment.
