A record number of men ages 25 through 54 are not in the labor force, according to an analysis of government data by Senate Budget Committee Republican staff.
According to the analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data, there are 61.1 million American men of those prime working ages, but one out of every eight of them are neither working nor actively looking for employment. Ranking member Jeff Sessions’ staffers note this is an all time high since 1955, when the government began tracking the data.
On top of the American men not in the workforce, 2.9 million men are unemployed, in the labor force but unable to find a job. According to Sessions’ staff analysis, 10.2 million men are simply not holding jobs — 3 million men in this age group more than before the recession.
“Although defenders of the current economy attribute shrinking labor force participation to the increasing pace of retirement of the Baby Boomer generation, these new statistics above confirm a trend that Barron’s recently diagnosed: ‘The ratio of those over 55 in the workforce actually ticked up’–in other words, older Americans are being forced to return to work in a poor economy to make ends meet while many younger Americans simply aren’t working at all,” the Republican committee staffers argued in their analysis. “In short, there is an unprecedented supply of working-age Americans who do not hold jobs.”
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