Workforce

Workforce or labor force is the total number of people available for work. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics defines labor force as “all persons classified as employed or unemployed.” Employed persons are individuals aged 16 years or older who work for an employer or are self-employed. This classification excludes volunteers and anyone who is engaged in self-service or homemaking. Unemployed persons are those aged 16 years or older without a job who are available for employment and have made active job search efforts in the previous four weeks. As of March 2015, there were close to 156.9 million individuals in the labor force, among whom 148.3 million were employed and 8.5 million were unemployed. The unemployment rate peaked, at a recent high of 10 percent (15.3 million) in October 2009, during the Great Recession, and it has since steadily declined to reach a low of 5.5 percent in March 2015.

Labor force participation rate is the proportion of employed and unemployed individuals among the working-age civilian noninstitutional population. It represents the percentage of the population who are working or actively looking for work or who are interested in working. This figure has gradually dropped from its most recent peak at 66 percent in May–July 2007 to 62.7 percent in March 2015. It is projected that the workforce will grow more slowly—for both men and women—at 0.5 percent per year between 2012 and 2022, in comparison with the 0.7 percent annual growth rate during the previous 10 years. This will further slow the growth of labor force participation rate, which is projected to decline to 61.6 percent in 2022. Another characteristic of the future workforce is that older baby boomers—workers aged 55 and above—are expected to make up over one-quarter in 2022. Economic growth is expected to slow down in general as a result of the labor force growth slowing down.

Given this overall picture of the labor market, workforce in the U.S. social policy context is understood as the labor force comprising disconnected and dislocated individuals—often characterized as low-income and low-skilled workers with a host of employment barriers—who are seeking employment while leaving the public welfare system. With the welfare state budget crisis and government downsizing of its public benefits, there has been a greater emphasis on the labor market solution to poverty. Due to the sweeping market-based welfare reform, one of the emerging social risks that requires greater attention has to do with a segment of the workforce called the precariat, or the group of workers who hold precarious positions in the secondary labor market. The precariat are often discouraged workers who experience an erosion of the American Dream (mobilization of workforce motivation into the positive-opportunity structure) due to polarization of the haves and the have-nots. Involuntary social exclusion experienced in the labor market may lead to voluntary exclusion from the labor force when the precariat face long-term unemployment.

Jacob Hacker argues in his book The Great Risk Shift that the political right’s renewed emphasis on “personal responsibility” is less an exercise in increasing choice and more a means of transferring risk away from large collective actors (e.g., governments or firms) to individuals, who typically have far fewer resources to deal with disaster when it happens. This risk shift has occurred during a time when expectations of stable employment have nearly disappeared and part-time work and temporary work have increased. These arrangements are set up for the convenience of employers, not workers. The decisions made by policymakers have exacerbated these risks by aiding and abetting the transfer of risks to individuals rather than countering them.

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