On Monday’s broadcast of CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” White House Council of Economic Advisers member Heather Boushey said that “it’s actually quite remarkable” our labor force participation rate is as good as it is “given long COVID, given how many families have been struggling with the pandemic, and with ongoing challenges with this difficult flu season” in 2022.
Boushey said that the labor supply is “an important, very important constraint on our economy right now, but it has been for a long time. … One of the things that the President focused on time and time again, as a part of the Build Back Better package, was making sure that workers and their families had access to care, child care, making sure families have homecare access and all of the things so that people could get to work. But we’ve seen, over the course of the pandemic, that labor supply, for the most part, has come back. It’s been a little bit volatile with the month-to-month. But that is a good indication that we’re on the right path. But certainly, these are longstanding issues, and some of it, too, is about the quality of jobs that people have.”
Co-host Joe Kernen then said, “I guess you remember back in the ’90s, Bill Clinton and somehow we came together on bipartisan welfare reform and the labor participation rate went way up in that period. Now, we’ve been through this pandemic…and now, after the pandemic relief bills, we’re sort of back into where it’s bloated at this point. Too much of the pandemic stimulus is still around so that it’s hard to induce people to come back, which, I need more money if I’m going to come back, which goes into the higher wages, which goes into the higher inflation. So, we’re trying to help people, but –.”
Boushey then cut in to respond, “There’s a fact that we need to be aware of, which is that, for prime-age workers, labor force participation is almost back to where it was, about where it was pre-pandemic. So, I think that we really — that argument needs a little bit of fine-tuning there to get the facts right. So, I think it’s actually quite remarkable, given long COVID, given how many families have been struggling with the pandemic, and with ongoing challenges with this difficult flu season this year, that actually things have looked so positive on that side of the ledger.”
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett
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