Almost all of the remaining shortfall in U.S. labor force participation is the result of demographic and other trends that predate the COVID pandemic, according to new research
After accounting for factors such as population aging and changes in education that influence people's willingness to work, the study showed that U.S. labor force participation was only about 0.3 percentage points short of where it would have been without the pandemic - equivalent to around 700,000 "missing" workers.
They attribute the remaining gap largely to fear of COVID or the lingering impact of "long COVID" illness, though they say their numbers, far below what some other studies have found, were "very much in the nature of guesstimates" given the difficulties of pinning down a precise motivation for why people left the workforce.
As of February, about 62.5% of U.S. adults were either working or looking for work, 0.8 percentage points below where it was in February of 2020, according to government figures. Another drag: The average hours worked per week fell by about 36 minutes per person from January 2020 through the end of 2022, a decline they said equates to the loss of about 2.4 million people.
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