Workers Paradise

Interesting and not surprising numbers from Investors Business Daily:

Nearly 1 Million Workers Vanished Under Obama
Initial jobless claims unexpectedly jumped by 24,000 last week to 399,000 as more workers lost their jobs, the Labor Department said Thursday. At the same time, the economy continues to lose workers.

In the 30 months since the recession officially ended, nearly 1 million people have dropped out of the labor force � they aren't working, and they aren't looking � according to data from Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics. In the past two months, the labor force shrank by 170,000.

This is virtually unprecedented in past economic recoveries, at least since the BLS has kept detailed records. In the past nine recoveries, the labor force had climbed an average 3.5 million by this point, according to an IBD analysis of the BLS data.

"Given weak job prospects, many would-be workers dropped out of (or never entered) the labor force," noted Heidi Shierholz of the Economic Policy Institute in her analysis of the BLS jobs report issued last Friday. "That reduces the measured unemployment rate but does not represent real improvement."

A bit more:

The smaller labor force is just one of the problems with the current unemployment number. The other is that the jobs being created aren't keeping pace with population growth. Since June 2009, the economy has added 1.4 million jobs, which is below the more than 2 million needed to keep up with population growth and far below the gains experienced at the same point in the previous 10 recoveries � which saw job gains average more than 4 million.

Payrolls are still 6.1 million below their January 2008 peak. After January, the current jobs recession will be the longest since the Great Depression.

Hope. Change. Yeah...