Polling News & Notes Overlooked Recent Polling and Insights • May 10, 2012
Labor Force Shrinks Under Obama: April’s employment report was disappointing for Americans looking for work and devastating for the growing number of those who have given up searching for a job and left the labor force all together.
The unemployment rate was 8.1%, but if the labor force participation rate was at the same level as when President Barack Obama took office (65.7%), the unemployment rate would have been 11.1%. Labor force participation fell to 63.6%, with 968,000 discouraged workers (up 103,000 from March), and 88.4 million Americans not in the labor force (that’s up 522,000 from March’s total) at all. Just how bad is it? These Bureau of Labor Statistics’ graphs puts it in historic perspective.
CIVILIAN LABOR FORCE PARTICIPATION RATE Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics Historic Database, Accessed May 8, 2012
April’s 63.6% labor force participation rate was not just the lowest rate of Mr. Obama’s term, but also the lowest rate in thirty years, since December 1981. This was a reflection of the 88.4 million civilians currently not in the workforce in April – the highest number on record.
TOTAL CIVILIANS NOT IN THE LABOR FORCE Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics – Historic Database, Accessed May 8, 2012
This is far from where Mr. Obama said the country would be in January 2009 when he tried to build support for his stimulus plan. It was then President-elect Obama’s Chair of his Economic Council, Christina Romer, and Jared Bernstein from Vice President-Elect Joe Biden’s office released a report entitled, “The Job Impact of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan.” The report promised the Recovery Plan would prevent the unemployment rate from going any higher than 8%, and threatened unemployment would climb to 9% if the stimulus were not passed. Unfortunately for Americans, the official unemployment rate went as high as 10% just eight months after the bill became law, and the “invisible” unemployment rate still hovers at 11.1%. Unfortunately for Mr. Obama, this is a number Americans are unlikely to forget.
From the House Committee on Ways and Means Analysis: “January 2009 Romer/Bernstein Report ("Administration Prediction With Stimulus Plan”), actual U.S. Department of Labor data and Ways and Means Republican staff calculations of invisible unemployed. The ‘invisible unemployed’ are defined as unemployed persons not included in official unemployment rate calculations because they are not currently in the labor force, compared with the month Democrats’ stimulus passed (February 2009). This includes people who quit looking for jobs since stimulus passed and dropped out of the labor force, plus other working-age adults who never entered the labor force, but presumably would have if the labor force participation rate was the same as when stimulus passed.”
###