http://themilitant.com/2017/8103/810352.html
The Militant (logo)
Vol. 81/No. 3 January 16, 2017
One way the government pretties up its monthly unemployment rate is to
keep reducing the percentage of workers (age sixteen and above) it
counts as part of the labor force. Since the sharpening of the
capitalist crisis in recent years, that share has fallen from more than
66 percent in 2008 to 62.8 percent in August 2016.
That’s the lowest since 1977, when the overall rate (for both men and
women, that is) was lower, since fewer than half of women sixteen and
above were then in the workforce. As fights by women and other working
people pushed back sex discrimination in employment, the female labor
participation rate rose to more than 60 percent by the mid-1990s and
remained roughly at that level until the 2008 crisis, falling below 57
percent since 2014.
The decline in the labor participation rate for men has been
particularly sharp, falling from 87 percent in 1950, to 73 percent in
2008, to 69 percent in 2016. As for the stretches of time workers go
with no job of any kind — an experience burned into the memories of
working-class families — the duration averaged 13.5 weeks over the
entire six decades between 1948 and 2008. Since then, the average has
jumped two and half times, to nearly eight months.
— from The Clintons’ Anti-Working-Class Record
Related articles:
From the pages of The Clintons’ Anti-Working-Class Record
How the Clintons cooked the books on prices, jobs
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home