MORE OPTING OUT OF WORKFORCE,
35% not looking for jobs
A larger percentage of potential Bay State workers are no longer looking for jobs, according to federal statistics, even as the state has added hundreds of thousands of jobs in recent years and the unemployment rate has plunged to under 3 percent.
Fully 35.3 percent of the state’s potential workforce is not looking for jobs. The labor force participation rate — the percentage of working age residents that either have a job or are looking for one — is down to 64.7 percent as of November 2016, the most recent data available, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That is down from 67.1 percent 10 years ago.
“It means the growth in employment and the number of jobs is constrained and more constrained every year,” said Alan Clayton-Matthews, a Northeastern University economist.
Massachusetts has steadily added jobs in recent years — more than 250,000 since the beginning of 2012 — and the unemployment rate is now down to 2.9 percent.
The decline in the participation rate is largely attributed to an aging workforce, where more and more baby boomers are hitting retirement age. But there are others, mostly uneducated men, who have seen an economy increasingly reliant on automation and outsourcing pass them by.
“Many of those folks have essentially thrown in the towel,” said Michael Goodman, executive director of the Public Policy Center at University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. “It’s becoming increasingly difficult in the contemporary United States for a less well-educated person to find work.”
A person without a job is considered by the government to be unemployed if they are actively seeking work.
It is not unique to Massachusetts. The national participation rate in December was to 62.7 percent, down from 66.4 percent 10 years before. Massachusetts has weathered this better than some states thanks to the yearly influx of college students and strong international immigration, said Robert Nakosteen, a UMass Amherst economist. But the college population is notoriously fickle about sticking around after graduation, and the future of immigration policy is unclear right now, he said. President-elect Donald Trump is reportedly working on a revamp of H-1B visas for foreign workers in specialty occupations such as technology.
“With the Trump administration’s pledge to cut down on immigration, is that flow of the international immigrants going to be limited?” Nakosteen said. “We depend on international immigration to fill these spots that our tight labor force can’t fill.”