Millions of workers are still missing after COVID. Where did they go?
Economists are scratching their heads as to how big the gap actually is and where all these people went.
While many older workers initially left the pandemic workforce out of health concerns, others chose to hang their hats for good. Fed Chair Jerome Powell has cited research by the central bank’s economists that show “excess retirements” account for more than 2 million of the missing workers, but that hasn’t been updated per the Labor Department’s revision.
A higher-than-average number of deaths in recent years, mainly from COVID-19, accounts for around 400,000 of the labor-force shortfall, according to the Fed. The pandemic killed many more people — about 1.1 million — but the majority were older and more likely to be out of the workforce.