- November's jobs report found millions of Americans are looking for better employment conditions.
- Over 12 million people are either long-term unemployed, seeking work to no avail, or employed part-time.
- This could point to a deeper issue, in which people aren't finding the jobs that suit them.
While the latest numbers on the state of jobs in America show that the US is still creeping towards recovery, one thing remained consistent: The economy still isn't working for millions of workers.
Even with the Delta wave easing, the number of jobs added in November was a big miss compared to expectations. On Friday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said that just 210,000 nonfarm payrolls were added in November — a far cry from the 550,000 that economists surveyed by Bloomberg forecasted.
In November, 7.4 million Americans fell into the government's official definition of being unemployed, meaning they were out of work and actively looking for a job.
Among those, 2.2 million have been unemployed for at least 27 weeks, suggesting that many potential workers have been struggling to find a job for months.
Aside from the officially unemployed, 4.3 million Americans employed part-time due to economic reasons, like seeing their hours cut or being unable to find a full-time job. The 5.9 million people who aren't actively seeking work but still say they want a job aren't seeing much improvement, either.
Add those three groups up, and at least 12.4 million Americans just aren't getting what they need from the economy right now.
Additionally, as the bureau noted, among those unemployed but still seeking a job, the number of those marginally attached to the labor force remained relatively unchanged, at 1.6 million.
"The number of discouraged workers, a subset of the marginally attached who believed that no jobs were available for them, was essentially unchanged over the month at 450,000," the bureau added.
That might seem at odds with reports of persistent labor shortages, but it actually could point to the deeper root issue. People do want to work, but the jobs available to them aren't the right fit — or their standards have changed. Take leisure and hospitality as an example. Previously, the low-wage industry had been leading the hiring charge, with wages pushed up month after month. But in November, employment there "changed little," according to the BLS, and wages for nonsupervisory employees actually went down.
Some job switchers are saying that "life is too short to stay in a job they weren't passionate about." Childcare crunches and COVID-19 fears also don't seem to be subsiding anytime soon, as the number of daycare workers drops and a new variant makes its way through the US. All of these factors suggest that labor shortages could be sticking around for quite some time, perhaps even forever.
"Labor shortages aren't going away anytime soon, because the pandemic is still going on," Daniel Zhao, a senior economist at Glassdoor, told Insider. Even if employers slow hiring because of the pandemic, workers will still likely hold back on returning. "The imbalance between supply and demand is still large enough that the reduction in available workers will mean that labor shortages are continuing."
As Insider's Ben Winck previously reported, the November jobs report could be reflecting Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell's attempt to pursue "maximum employment," rather than "full employment," which presents a risk.
Full employment is a tactic the Fed has stood by for decades, referring to minimizing deviations when employment was too high or too low. This time around, the Fed is looking at maximum employment — an uncharted territory that aims to push not just for low unemployment, but also inclusivity and healthy wage growth. In other words, it's getting these 12 million workers into better jobs.
However, sticking with that model could cause inflation to soar — something Americans across the country are experiencing right now, especially during a holiday season. And as seen with the jobs numbers, people aren't happy about it.