What's going on with men's labor force participation?

0:01NPR.

0:11This is the Indicator for Planet Money. I'm Adrienne Ma. I'm Waylon Wong. And I'm Darian Woods. It is Jobs Friday. It's the day of the month where we check in on the latest jobs report and we talk about trends in the American labor market. And as always, we start off with the headline numbers. So today's jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that in December, the unemployment rate ticked down slightly to 4.1%. That's good news. And the economy also added 256 ,000 jobs. So for the last month of 2024, the jobs market finished pretty strong. Yeah, it's looking pretty good. Yeah, and what's interesting is that for a few months there, there were some concerning signs that maybe the jobs market was softening.

0:57Although those numbers were also sort of muddied by labor strikes and hurricanes. But in any case, these latest numbers suggest that employers are in a hiring mood right now. So coming up, we'll dig a little deeper. And we'll also talk about the jobs indicators that we find most interesting right now. I'll talk about how a lot of Americans saw their wages rise in 2024. I'm going to look at what's going on with men's participation in the labor force. Also, why people who are unemployed are staying that way for longer. That's all coming up after the break. This message comes from NPR sponsor Zendesk, introducing the next generation of AI agents built to deliver resolutions for everyone.

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2:06All right, it's Jobs Friday. Adrian, what did you find most compelling about today's jobs report? So for me, it has got to be wages. In 2024, the average hourly wage increased to$35.69 an hour. That's an increase of 3.9 % from a year before that. And over roughly this same period, we saw inflation increase by 2.7%. So put that together, for the second year in a row, wages increased faster than inflation. And this is notable because, of course, a lot of people have been feeling the hangover of inflation over the past year. But I think it's also important to recognize that wage growth over the past couple of years has actually beat inflation.

2:50And whether that will continue this year, I think, is a big question because we're going into the Trump administration and some of Donald Trump's marquee policies. we're talking things like tariffs and mass deportation, we would expect those kinds of policies to actually make inflation worse. So this is something I think we should keep our eye on in 2025. So that's my indicator. Darian, you want to go next? Yeah, so one indicator from the jobs report I'm really interested in is how long people are unemployed for. The median length of time that people were out of a job in December was 10 and a half weeks.

3:27That's about a week longer than a year ago. All right, so 10 and a half weeks, that's like two and a half months. What should we make of that number? Yeah, so that time itself is fairly standard for the last couple of decades outside of recessions. Of course, those two and a half months are very uncomfortable for the person looking for a job, but it's not a flashing red light for the economy as a whole. But what is more concerning is the trend. The amount of time that people have been out of work has been slowly rising over the last couple of years. We are now in a cooler labor market than we were in those buoyant post-pandemic months.

4:04So this sounds a little bit concerning. Yeah, and even more so when you zoom in on people who are unemployed for about six months or longer. This group is rising, although they did notch down a little in today's jobs report. They're considerably less likely to find a job than people who were unemployed for shorter amounts of time. How much of that would be because people who are unemployed longer might be, I don't know, like a different group of people, maybe with different or less qualifications? That could be part of it. But most long-term unemployed people actually look pretty similar to short-term unemployed people.

4:39The types of qualifications don't change much. One analysis found that black and older workers were more likely to be unemployed for longer though. There is, however, this interesting evidence that being unemployed for several months itself is bad for your job prospects. Some employers discriminate against people who have been unemployed for longer. And for the job seekers, their skills may have faded over time. Also, they might lose hope. There is research showing they put fewer hours into looking for jobs. I mean, economists have like a formal definition for a discouraged worker, but you could be feeling discouraged long before you're officially discouraged.

5:17Yeah, it's almost like a continuum before you officially just give up looking for jobs entirely. And, you know, the overall trend of people becoming unemployed for longer periods of time, the broad trend is that when people lose a job now, they tend to take longer to find a job than, say, in the 1960s. Ooh, okay. So, a slightly sobering indicator there. What do you think, Waylon? Are you bringing up the optimism average or bringing it down? Well, I think the jury's still going to be out because I want to look at another long-term trend where there's a lot of different ways you could look at this.

5:56I want to look at what's going on with men's labor force participation. This is the percentage of working-age men who are employed or are looking for a job. And the participation rate for men has been falling for several decades now for reasons that I'll get to. But lately, it's been trending up a little bit. So in the latest jobs report, the participation rate for men over the age of 20 was 70.2%. This rate is almost back to pre-pandemic levels. Right. So this is another way to measure how well men are doing in the labor market. I did a pretty similar story recently about men's wages and how they've stagnated or decreased for men who don't have a college degree.

6:36So in this particular metric around labor force participation, what's been going on for men? Well, like I mentioned before, their overall participation rate was falling for decades before the pandemic. And a lot of the research has focused on prime age working men. So that's ages 25 to 54. In surveys, this group gives a few different reasons why they're not in the labor force. One is retirement, which is kind of interesting given their age. But another big factor is disability or illness. And there's research suggesting that opioid use might play a role here. These are like two very different stories for like why people might be out of the labor force.

7:14I mean, somebody just being retired versus somebody being like too sick to work. Yeah, no, this story has a lot of angles. And then you add in some of the other big reasons that come up in the surveys. One is caretaking. You know, maybe someone stops working in order to care for young children. And then the last one I'll mention is that they're in school. It's kind of across the life experience spectrum, all these different reasons. I mean, that's fascinating. If there are a huge group of men who want to be working but can't because of health problems or caregiving responsibilities, that points to some pretty big public policy challenges.

7:48It does. And this, again, relates to your episode on men's wages, right, where there are structural things to address. And I think these things all have to work in concert. Okay, so we've talked about some indicators to keep our eyes on, long-term trends with unemployment and men in the labor force, and also rising wages. Thanks, Waylon, Darian, everybody being here for another Jobs Friday. Yeah. Until next time. One more to the A-Horn. This is the indicator for Planet Money. Same time, same place. Don't touch that dial. Same BLS link. Oh, before we go, a quick update. A couple weeks ago, we did a family feud episode with our friends at Planet Money.

8:29We each made our case for which indicator was the indicator for 2024. And we asked you, the listeners, to vote on it. The results are in. Drumroll, please.

8:44In first place with more than half the votes was my indicator, Consumer Sentiment. All right. Love to see it. Applause, applause. Very well done, Adrian. Congratulations. Okay, so I'm not one to gloat, but I will say that it is nice to bring the Family Feud trophy over to the indicator side for once. In second place, a respectable showing for The Beverage Curve and the Crypto Bros, but not chosen as the indicator of 2024. So maybe next year, Planet Money friends. This episode was produced by Angel Carreras with engineering by Neil Rauch and Jimmy Keely. It was fact-checked by Sierra Juarez. Cake and Cannon is our editor and the indicators of production of NPR.