WHERE DID ALL THE WORKERS GO ? written by Claudia St . John , Big I Hires / The Workplace Advisors
Recently I was sharing a cab with a client on my way to speak at a conference . He turned to me and said that he was interested to hear what I had to say about the state of the U . S . labor market . When I asked him what specifically he was hoping to hear in my talk , he said , “ Well , I ’ m hoping you ’ re going to tell us where the workers went and when they ’ re going to come back . When are they going to get off the sofa and back to work . We ’ re dying out here and people just don ’ t seem to want to work anymore .”
If only I had a dollar for every time someone asked me this exact same question : where all the workers went and when they were going to come back . The truth , everyone IS back to work . They ’ ve been back to work for a long time . The problem is , there just aren ’ t as many of them as there used to be . And when I explain this to people like my client , they seem surprised . And that , in turn , surprises me because these labor trends have been on the horizon for a long time . I think business owners have been ignoring the reality that there aren ’ t enough workers for all the jobs that are out there . In fact , as of August 1 , 2023 , there were almost 4 million more jobs than there were workers available to fill them . And what ’ s worse is that we don ’ t anticipate this changing anytime soon .
In fact , this has become my personal and professional mission it seems – to travel the country speaking to business leaders , making them aware of what they should already know : there simply aren ’ t enough workers to satisfy all of the promises companies have made to their customers , let alone to support their growth projections . And here ’ s why :
EIGHT MILLION MISSING WORKERS
Since the COVID 19 pandemic , we have lost approximately eight million workers from the workplace . There are a number of places those workers went :
• According to Fed Chairman Jerome Powell , close to 500,000 workers died from COVID
• The Brookings Institute reports that 1.6 million full-time workers have left the workforce due to long COVID
• Goldman Sachs reports that 2.5 million older workers retired earlier than anticipated and are not returning to the workforce
• According to the Society for Human Resources Management ( SHRM ), there are nearly 2 million fewer women in the labor force due to childcare
10 KANSAS INSURANCE AGENT & BROKER