Brian Mena

speaker

38 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Nov 2022 last heard Nov 2022

Brian Mena’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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WSJ Your Money Briefing · Why Are So Many Older Gen Z Workers Not Seeking Jobs? · 17 Nov 2022 podcast

This really puts employers in a bind because they have fewer older workers, but they also have fewer workers in their early 20s.

They're starting out in their career who are seen as investments, who you train, and you expect to remain at a company for years.

Thanks so much for having me.

So we're talking about a shortfall of about 500,000 workers when you compare the workforce size in February 2020 to October 2022.

So in February 2020, you had 15.3 million workers between the ages of 20 to 24.

And then in October, you had a workforce size of about 14.8 million workers.

Interestingly, this tight labor market did do the trick in luring back teenagers into the workforce, specifically workers between the ages of 16 and 19.

And so, you know, these workers are right in the biggest wage increases last year.

And we saw participation not only recover to its pre-pandemic level, but increase.

The average participation rate in 2021 was a high since 2009.

And so clearly it shows that these higher wages, these plentiful job opportunities, and there were some instances of employers reducing the requirements.

All these factors really did the trick in luring back these teenagers.

But that wasn't the case for the early 20-somethings.

Yeah, so labor force participation is still lower than before the pandemic.

And it's particularly lower for people over 55.

And we know this because some of them took early retirements because of the fears surrounding the pandemic or the difficulty in finding suitable work at their stage in their careers.

So it's not just 20-somethings, it's also older folks.

But overall, you have participation that's still lower than before the pandemic.

That's one possibility, but this is where we get conflicting data because data from the National Student Clearinghouse shows that there were about 1.5 million freeware students enrolled in college this fall compared with before the pandemic.

In the past, research has shown that a decline in labor force participation among younger workers

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