National Journal:  Forget the Unemployment Rate: The Alarming Stat Is the Number of 'Missing Workers'

The federal government’s latest snapshot of the unemployment rate offered few bright spots Friday. The economy added 165,000 jobs in April—slightly better than March’s revised number of 138,000 jobs...

The glaring caveat to this jobs report is the huge number of Americans who remain out of the workforce. Called the "labor force participation rate" in wonkspeak, that number held steady in April at 63.3 percent—the lowest level since 1979...

Demographics and retirements certainly played some role, though economists cannot agree on the extent. About 6.7 million people have stopped looking for work since late 2007, says Heidi Shierholz, an economist with the left-leaning think tank Economic Policy Institute. Roughly 3 million to 5 million of them left because they could not find jobs, economists estimate.

Mind you, these are not people who collect unemployment insurance and send out resumes in search of their next gig. These are people who—at least, temporarily—have exited the workforce. In March, the jobs report showed that 496,000 had dropped out.

So, who are these “missing workers?” Frustratingly, no one knows exactly who they are, why they left, and if they’ll ever return. “The size of the pool there and the gap between the potential labor force and the actual working force represents a huge loss of potential productivity,” Shierholz says.
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Link: http://www.nationaljournal.com/domesticpolicy/forget-the-unemployment-rate-the-alarming-stat-is-the-number-of-missing-workers-20130503