The number of Americans who’ve left the labor force has reached a new high under President Donald Trump — eclipsing spikes tied to the Great Recession and the Covid-19 pandemic, stunning new government figures show.
The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis tallied 105.8 million people over 16 who were unemployed and not actively seeking work in June, the New York Post reported Wednesday.
That number includes 832,000 who dropped out of the labor force last month, according to the Post, and it came after American businesses created just 57,000 jobs in June, less than half the 115,000 forecast by economists surveyed by The Wall Street Journal.
The White House didn’t immediately respond to an inquiry from The Independent.
Nicholas Eberstadt, an economist at the business-friendly American Enterprise Institute think tank, said the labor-force figures illustrated a “big problem” involving “the flight from work of prime-age men.”
“Very roughly speaking, there are about 7 million of these men who are out of the labor force for the 25-to 54-year-olds,” Eberstadt told the Post.
Eberstadt, the author of 2016’s Men Without Work, described that cohort as “the healthiest, best-educated Americans that have ever lived on the planet.”
And while “what’s been carrying the overall prime-age labor force participation has been the strong involvement of women,” about 3.5 million of them have also left the labor force, he said.
“There’s a growing group of dropout women who are neither working nor looking for work, have no children under the same roof with them and no husband present,” Eberstadt said.
Americans are considered “not in the labor force” if they don’t want a job, haven’t looked for one in more than a year or aren’t available to work if offered a job, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
They’re also not counted among the nation’s unemployed workers, who in June totalled 7.1 million.
Both that number and June’s unemployment rate of 4.2 percent have been largely unchanged for the past year, the BLS said.
About half of those who’ve left the labor force are retirees, and another 23.3 percent are receiving long-term benefits for illness, disability or other reasons, the Post said.
About 17 percent are full-time students and about five percent have stopped looking for work.
