The American workforce is in crisis, buffeted by one challenge after another – some recent, and some, like demographic changes, that have been building for decades. At a recent employment law seminar – our first in-person employment program since 2019 - Pierce Atwood brought together clients from health care, higher education, accounting, the nonprofit sector, and other industries to discuss both short- and long-term solutions to these challenges.
With an entire generation of baby boomers now retiring, a smaller Gen-X cohort that can’t replace them, and a public education system falling behind other developed countries in preparing students, there simply aren’t enough qualified workers to fill the pipeline with capable younger successors. These factors are conspiring to change the face of the American workplace, as many businesses confront poor prospects for growth, or even survival, with their current business models.
Demographics and a frayed education system may be working in a kind of negative synergy, but they also have co-conspirators. One is the overall U.S. labor force participation rate, which has been declining for at least 20 years:
The participation rate had already begun its downward trend when the Great Recession hit in 2008. It never returned to pre-recession levels before the pandemic struck in 2020, and it has not recovered even to where it was in 2019. A smaller working...
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