Number of Americans ‘Not in Labor Force’ Hit Record High in February

[Stephanie]

SNIP:
Friday, 08 Mar 2013 01:30 PM

By Dan Weil
While the 236,000 gain in non-farm payrolls and the 0.2 percentage-point drop in unemployment for February excited many, another number threw some cold water on the optimism.

The number of Americans who count as "not in the labor force" totaled 89,304,000, a record high, and up 0.3 percent from 89,008,000 in January, according to the Labor Department, CNSNews.com reports.

“Not in the labor force” means they have given up looking for work or have retired (early or on schedule).

Editor's Note: Use This Single Loophole to Pay Zero Taxes in 2013

The number of “not in the labor force” rose for the second month in a row, after registering 88.8 million in December.

There may be less to the improvement in the jobless rate — to 7.7 percent in February from 7.9 percent in January — than meets the eye as well. The Labor Department notes that the rate “has shown little movement, on net, since September 2012,” when it totaled 7.8 percent.


all of it here
Those Not in Labor Force Rose in February

 

[Daktoria]

I'm not convinced there's a solution to this problem.

People aren't looking for work because there's nothing to work for other than survival. Republicans day in day out refer to rugged individualism without heritage, and Democrats simply pick and choose politically correct demographics they like for government employment.

There is no economic recovery because employers are looking to be superficially productive while blaming the victims of social alienation. If you lack references and experience, you're told to be a slave in volunteer groups, work for minimum wage in retail, or join the military.

This country is no different from the Soviet Union. There is no environment for creative thinking.

 

[Unkotare]

I'm not convinced there's a solution to this problem.

People aren't looking for work because there's nothing to work for other than survival. Republicans day in day out refer to rugged individualism without heritage, and Democrats simply pick and choose politically correct demographics they like for government employment.

There is no economic recovery because employers are looking to be superficially productive while blaming the victims of social alienation. If you lack references and experience, you're told to be a slave in volunteer groups, work for minimum wage in retail, or join the military.

This country is no different from the Soviet Union. There is no environment for creative thinking.

There seems to be a rich environment for you to go insane in.

 

[Daktoria]

I'm not convinced there's a solution to this problem.

People aren't looking for work because there's nothing to work for other than survival. Republicans day in day out refer to rugged individualism without heritage, and Democrats simply pick and choose politically correct demographics they like for government employment.

There is no economic recovery because employers are looking to be superficially productive while blaming the victims of social alienation. If you lack references and experience, you're told to be a slave in volunteer groups, work for minimum wage in retail, or join the military.

This country is no different from the Soviet Union. There is no environment for creative thinking.

There seems to be a rich environment for you to go insane in.

lol....

If by rich and insane, you mean a boon to grant people hope where there is none, probably.

This country needs help. It needs massive psychological, philosophical, ideological help. It needs to appreciate due process, due diligence, duty of care, procedural justice, discourse ethics, and rules of engagement on the basis of analytic jurisprudence. It needs to stop catering to pragmatism and equating correlation to causation in order to figure out what's fair.

This country needs people in charge who can think about culture, not people who are simply trying to get results in order to make things work. It needs to realize that people need to be inspired to work. People aren't machines, computers, robots, or tools.

 

[hortysir]

SNIP:
Friday, 08 Mar 2013 01:30 PM

By Dan Weil
While the 236,000 gain in non-farm payrolls and the 0.2 percentage-point drop in unemployment for February excited many, another number threw some cold water on the optimism.

The number of Americans who count as "not in the labor force" totaled 89,304,000, a record high, and up 0.3 percent from 89,008,000 in January, according to the Labor Department, CNSNews.com reports.

“Not in the labor force” means they have given up looking for work or have retired (early or on schedule).

Editor's Note: Use This Single Loophole to Pay Zero Taxes in 2013

The number of “not in the labor force” rose for the second month in a row, after registering 88.8 million in December.

There may be less to the improvement in the jobless rate — to 7.7 percent in February from 7.9 percent in January — than meets the eye as well. The Labor Department notes that the rate “has shown little movement, on net, since September 2012,” when it totaled 7.8 percent.


all of it here
Those Not in Labor Force Rose in February

We all know the effects of the 'baby-boomers' are going to be felt in our UE numbers and our Disability numbers.

We need to find a way to be able to grow at a faster rate then their retirements.

 

[Dugdale_Jukes]

SNIP:
Friday, 08 Mar 2013 01:30 PM

By Dan Weil
While the 236,000 gain in non-farm payrolls and the 0.2 percentage-point drop in unemployment for February excited many, another number threw some cold water on the optimism.

The number of Americans who count as "not in the labor force" totaled 89,304,000, a record high, and up 0.3 percent from 89,008,000 in January, according to the Labor Department, CNSNews.com reports.

[snip]

There may be less to the improvement in the jobless rate — to 7.7 percent in February from 7.9 percent in January — than meets the eye as well. The Labor Department notes that the rate “has shown little movement, on net, since September 2012,” when it totaled 7.8 percent.

The actual unemployment/underemployment rate hasn't been under ten percent since 2001 and maybe it wasn't that low then. Reagan's people began de-industrializing the US in favor of "new economy" nonsense. In sum the plan was to turn the US economy into a services and information-based economy and subsidize it with (hilariously Keynesian) "supply side" bullshit to hide temporary damage.

Even before the election Pap Bush derided it as "voodoo" economics and later David Stockman quit when he realized it would at some point produce catastrophic failure because the fuels were faith and credit and the interest could not possibly be supported.

Someone above (paraphrased) wrote 'there may not be a way out of this'. This is correct in terms of anyone over 50. No one fifty or over will ever again work in the kind of economy that existed in America through the 1980s. It used to make me laugh when Clintonista assholes would brag about the jobs he created; people living below the mean would say, "I know. I have three of them."

Clinton opened the borders to the worst elements, cheap labor and cheap goods. Bourgeoisie still squeal with delight buying electronic toys made by child labor and forced labor. Hard to imagine anyone before Reagan putting up with that, but Clinton bragged about it, Junebug deliriously celebrated the destruction of the blue collar middle class, and Obama put a trillion down the drain in his own failed "supply side" experiment, giving the stupidest money managers in earthly history - state and local governments trillions to preserve his only dependable white voting base - government workers. It worked for him, but it didn't work for America.

The result of Reagan's FriedmaNUTism is the US population is now probably permanently trifurcated into a throwaway class, the bottom third of wage earners and people not in the workforce; a chattel class- the middle third who can look forward to lives back and forth from unemployment and the bitter edge of prosperity; and a class of well credentialed self-serving fatassed and/or fatheaded bourgeoisie that make the Vichy French look like Conquistadors, whose working lives are spent in government or helping corporations trash the bottom two thirds of Americans.

The top four or five percent will do as they please and use religious nonsense and law to ensure plenty of aspirational halfwits give their lives protecting essentially oligarchic privilege. I should be glad. But my Appalachian ancestors raised me to loathe scum, and, well, I do. But this isn't about me...

In sum, the US economy remains too credit-fueled to possibly recover. The opportunity for that was Sept 2008 when that ratty little cocksucker had a chance to vaporize twenty or thirty trillion in fake money and instead gave Wall Street about a billion to prop it up until Jan 20, 1981.

When Obama hired Geithner I laughed. Another fucking ReagaNUT in liberal clothing.

Here is the bottom line: until the trillions of bad debt hidden in low margin/no margin derivatives - mostly forms of credit default swaps - are WIPED OUT everything is at risk. What happened in 2008 will look like a Sunday school picnic unless these "too big to fail" borderline criminal element are reclassified as dangers to the nation, identified, hunted down and destroyed one way or another. Until that is done nothing can change - until the next crash.

 

[Unkotare]

I'm not convinced there's a solution to this problem.

People aren't looking for work because there's nothing to work for other than survival. Republicans day in day out refer to rugged individualism without heritage, and Democrats simply pick and choose politically correct demographics they like for government employment.

There is no economic recovery because employers are looking to be superficially productive while blaming the victims of social alienation. If you lack references and experience, you're told to be a slave in volunteer groups, work for minimum wage in retail, or join the military.

This country is no different from the Soviet Union. There is no environment for creative thinking.

There seems to be a rich environment for you to go insane in.

lol....

If by rich and insane, you mean a boon to grant people hope where there is none, probably.

This country needs help. It needs massive psychological, philosophical, ideological help. .

And why do you feel that YOU are in any way qualified to provide such help, you fucking headcase?


YOU need a shrink and a rubber room ASAP.

 

[pinqy]

“Not in the labor force” means they have given up looking for work or have retired (early or on schedule).

No, that's not what it means. Not in the Labor Force is simply everyone in the Adult Civilian Non-Institutional Population who are neither employed (working) or Unemployed (willing and available to work, actively looked for work in the last 4 weeks).
So while it does include retirees and people who "gave up" looking for work, it also includes people who can't work, don't want/need to work, full time students, stay home spouses etc etc.

About 92% of those Not in the Labor Force say they don't want a job.
Of those that say they do want a job, over half haven't looked in over a year, which makes their claim a little iffy but in a more practical sense, useless to telling us what the labor market is like now and not reliable as people who might start looking for work soon.

Of those that have lookied in the last year but not the last 4 weeks, just over 20% say they couldn't have accepted a job if offered.

So that leaves us with the Marginally Attached: those who say they want a job, are available for work, have looked in the last year but not last 4 weeks: 3% of those Not in the Labor Force.

But wait, there's more: most of the marginally attached stopped looking for personal reasons: 11% for family responsibilities, 14% for school, 9% for illness or injury and 32% for Other (transportation or child care issues mostly). 34% of the Marginally Attached (1% of all Not in the Labor Force) "gave up" due to belief that there were no jobs available, that they didn't have the right skills, training, or education, or that they faced discrimination due to age/sex/race/etc.

Now, there's no count of how many Not in the Labor Force are retired (though 39% are 65 or older), but it seems odd to me that the article is citing less than half of Not in the Labor Force as the only reasons and putting the 1% who have "given up" as equal to the around 40% who are retired (though many of those 65+ might never have worked or quit working due to disability).

 

[editec]

It is most disturbing that the percentage of adult Americans who are working is declining.

But this IS the society that we have created, isn't it?

OUR MASTERS outsourced tens of millions of jobs to take advantage of near slave level wages in formerly communist lands and emerging nations.

Productivity eliminated tens of millions of jobs replacing human labor with technology, too.

And as our society wants to pretend that somehow those trends are no problem?

Well we SEE how this is effecting our society, but we keep telling ourselves that somehow education and hard work can overcome those trends.

Clearly, education is not the answer as most people are not EVER going to be able to work cheaper, or more efficiently that the technology that is replacing human labor every damned day.

We need to RETHINK the social contract.

WE don't want to because, right now, these trends are making the elite class of capital SO rich, they don't give a rat's ass what is happening to most of us.

 

[Unkotare]

'Class' warfare BS above. ^

 

[SteadyMercury]

The blurb about a record for number not in labor force is pointless, as even a country with a constant unemployment rate with a growing population would continue to set records for the number of people not in the labor force.

Throw in demographic trends and one would certainly expect to see this record broken even in a very healthy economy.