Gen Z’s Hole in the Labor Market Could Soon Grow
Americans in their 20s continue to have lower employment and labor-force participation rates than before the pandemic, and economic uncertainty won’t help.
Myriad factors appear to be holding 20-somethings back.
Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg
The Covid-19 pandemic brought some big shifts in the US labor market. The biggest was the departure of millions of older workers, ending a decades-long rise in employment and labor-force participation rates for those 65 and older. Smaller, but perhaps more troubling, has been the decline in both those measures for Americans in their 20s.
(These numbers are as of February because labor-market statistics for most narrow age groups aren’t seasonally adjusted, so to compare with how things stood just before the pandemic in February 2020 you need to look at the same month this year. They’re three-month averages because otherwise the data are pretty noisy.)