Is the Unemployment Rate Low or Is the Employment Rate Low?

Surprise and No Surprise. A lot of people were employed at the end of 2019. When the pandemic hit US and we shut down the economy, around 20 million people became unemployed almost immediately and stayed that way for a couple months, and slowly crept back up. This included non-essential workers like middle managers and teachers. It did not include essential workers like doctors, grocery clerks, and trash haulers. A lot of those jobs are now filled again, causing people to step back into roughly 10 million jobs in 2020 and 10 million jobs in 2021 and so far in calendar 2022. But not all; we still have not replaced about 525,000 workers that would bring US back up to pre-pandemic employment.

Now, during the two replacement years, we also should have generated about 6.1 million jobs to fill the population growth of job seekers between the ages of 18 and 67. Those jobs are generated and out there but are not being filled fully. So along with the 5 million unfilled jobs, plus about another 5 million jobs still available from the economic boom of the second half of 2020, we have about 10 million unfilled jobs. We also have about 11 million non-working age-appropriate adults. That’s a heterogeneous  mix of older, younger, previously-employed, new graduates, and even older people who must return to the job market due to inability to pay for their daily lives.