Economists have spent the past week arguing about why 720,000 people walked away from the labor force in a single month. Laura Ullrich, director of economics at Indeed Hiring Lab and a former Richmond Fed economist, says that rather than treating June’s slide to a 61.5% labor force participation rate—the lowest reading outside the pandemic since 1976—as a story about discouraged workers giving up,…
Labor force participation falls to 61.5%, the lowest in 50 years outside COVID
