Defying expectations, a hot U.S. job market is pulling in workers from the sidelines.
In this March. 6, 2019, photo Valarie Regas poses for a photo at Ponce City Market in Atlanta. Child care costs delayed Regas' return to the job market after she gave birth to her second child in 2012. Regas wanted to go back, but most of the jobs she found didn’t pay enough to cover child care. So, she remained mostly out of the job market for five more years. After completing a coding boot camp, Regas was hired last year by a division of the European aerospace giant Airbus.
For five years after the Great Recession ended in 2009, many Americans gave up on their job hunts. Some suffered from disabilities. Others enrolled in school or stayed home to raise children. Still others were stymied by criminal pasts or failed drug tests. Some just felt discouraged by their job prospects. Because they weren’t actively seeking work, they weren’t even counted as unemployed.
On Friday, the government will report on job growth during February, and analysts are forecasting a solid if unspectacular gain of 183,000. That would fall below last year’s monthly average of 220,000 but would still be enough to lower the unemployment rate, now 4 percent, over time. Other factors that have held some people back from seeking work have included the high cost of child care and a lack of paid leave. Research suggests that such costs have held back the workforce participation rate of prime-age U.S. women, a rate that trails those in most other industrialized countries.
The rebound has confounded many experts’ projections. The Federal Reserve has consistently underestimated the likelihood of more people finding jobs. In 2013, its policymakers estimated that “full employment” — the lowest point to which unemployment was thought capable of reaching without sparking higher inflation — would arrive when the unemployment rate was between 5.2 percent and 5.8 percent.
Average pay is still growing more slowly than it did the last time unemployment was this low. Adam Ozimek, an economist at Moody’s Analytics, says this suggests that there is still room for companies to raise pay and perhaps entice even more people into the job market.
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