A record number of Americans aren't in the labor force


While the April jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) showed just 5.4 percent unemployment, a less noticed figure paints a grimmer picture: The labor force participation rate stayed low, at 62.8 percent, and a record 93,194,000 Americans are not in the labor force. This participation rate has stayed essentially the same for about a year, though the total count of people outside the labor force has increased.
The distinction between "unemployed" and "not in the labor force" can seem like a matter of semantics, but it's actually pretty significant. To be unemployed, according to the BLS, means you are an adult who does "not have a job, [has] actively looked for work in the prior 4 weeks, and [is] currently available for work."
To be out of the labor force is to be an adult who does not have a job and is not looking for one. That category could include people who don't want a job because they're retired or staying home to raise children, but it also includes people who would like to work but have become so discouraged in the job-seeking process that they've stopped looking altogether.
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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.
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