While official unemployment is low, that is only people actively looking for work. Labour force participation is way down from it's highs when it peaked in the late 90's. From a peak of around 67%, the US is currently at 62%[1], and the fall off corresponds to the time when imports from China were rising hard and it was the trendy thing to do among executives to shutdown US plants and move production to China.
Many people and towns that lost work in the manufacturing shut downs still don't have replacement work, and I think part of that is we lost a lot of low-skilled labour work as the factories left.
Now a question would be, if the work does come back, will it be low skilled enough to be able to hire the same pool of people formerly employed?
Unfortunately I think that's just aging of the population. There's no upper age limit in that calculation. It includes retirees as "not in the labour force".
If you look at the participation rate of people aged 25-54 it's near all time highs.
Something is weird there, as the 55+ was increasing in the period of about 1995 to 2010, while the overall was down in point 2000, and 25-54 was flat. Weird.
Huh, glad you dug into that. Below that chart they link the youth rates, and they're way down. Teenage labour force participation peaked in 1978, with a mini peak in 1989, and 20-24 in 1989, with a mini peak in 2001.
The answer there is likely we're keeping them in school longer + filling downtime with school or social media or "extracurriculars". Alongside a growing NEET cohort that doesn't feel motivation to do anything or is disabled.
As for 55+, I'd be very interested to see the relative age distribution within that pool over that period. I suspect there's a lot more 65+ within the pool now than when the rate was higher. That trend is set to grow.
Something's weird but there's so many factors it's hard to say exactly -what-.
e.x. In the 90s there was a lot of 'culling' of older workers especially if they didn't embrace tech I know my father was forced into retirement despite being a fully capable worker (heck he did database consulting work for a transit system after the forced retirement, before he became a floral delivery driver.)
In his case, he wanted to retire, but honestly he tried to give me and my siblings a better life so the consulting and part time jobs were something to help pay off PLUS loans while also letting him and my mom be able to do vacations and the like.
But I'm also thinking about the factor of a lot of folks had a lot of hits.
Also 25-54 is such a rough demographic.... Lots of ways to just keep that metric clean FBOW.
[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART/
Many people and towns that lost work in the manufacturing shut downs still don't have replacement work, and I think part of that is we lost a lot of low-skilled labour work as the factories left.
Now a question would be, if the work does come back, will it be low skilled enough to be able to hire the same pool of people formerly employed?