The workforce in the United States is much older and much more diverse than it was 40 or so years ago. Officials from the US Labor statistics recently conducted an analysis of federal labor statistics to determine how the nation’s labor force has evolved over the last few decades
According to a blog post published on the bureau’s website on September 1. When analysing the Consumer Population Survey data, researchers and economists looked at it from “peak to peak,” focusing on the years 1979 and 2019, which were both record-breaking years for employment and economic activity.
The Workforce In The US Post Covid Has Become Considerably Older And More Varied
An overview of how the American labour force has evolved over time, as well as some of the causes for the most significant changes in its composition, is provided below.
People over the age of 65 made for 3 per cent of the nation’s workforce in 1979, making up the lowest segment of the population at the time. In terms of the percentage of the population, teenagers aged 16 to 19 years old accounted for 8.2 per cent of the population, according to CPS statistics.
Forty years later, the pattern had flipped: individuals 65 and older accounted for 6.6 per cent of the nation’s employment, while older adolescents accounted for 3.2 percent.
Additionally, the age group of 55 to 64 years old had a rise of 5.5 percent to 17.2 percent, while the age group of 20 to 24 years old saw a decrease of 6 percentage points to 8.5 percent.
However, according to Joe Piacentini, economic adviser to BLS Commissioner William Beach, such percentage changes are mostly due to generational transition, particularly the ageing of the huge Baby Boomer cohort. However, ageing is not the sole factor contributing to the adjustments.
Other contributing reasons include medical advancements that have resulted in longer lives, less physically demanding occupations and a decline in the involvement of teenagers in the work market.
Teenagers are working in lower numbers now than they were a few decades ago, mainly as a result of a greater emphasis on school attendance and educational achievement.
According to SerdarBirinci, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, the makeup of the workforce has significant implications for the dynamics of the labour market. According to the author, the “job-to-job switching rate” is an important predictor of future pay growth, who points out that older employees change positions less often than younger ones.
His conclusion is that monetary policy may be affected, with the resulting impacts on job transition rates, wage growth, and inflation being dampened as a result. According to the Bureau of Working Statistics (BLS), employees who were married accounted for almost two-thirds of the US labour force in 1979.
Forty years later, that percentage was slightly higher than 52 percent. The statistics on the workforce is generally consistent with larger social trends: People have been getting married at a lower rate in recent years. People have become less enthusiastic about the concept of marriage, which has been ascribed to a number of reasons, including female educational and labour market achievement, decreases in religious involvement, and economic constraints, among others.