STRATEGIC

Leveraging U.S. Strengths, Dealing with Vulnerabilities 83
States economy 6.4 million “missing” jobs that were never created. 27
Although unemployment rates are now low, labor-force participation
has continued to decline since 2000, even among men and women
of prime working age. 28 Since 1991, earnings have been mostly flat.
Real median earnings rose only 9 percent over 25 years, 29 not including
benefits, such as employer-paid health insurance and other forms
of compensation generally offered to better-paid workers. The percentage
of Americans engaged in “alternative work arrangements”—
temporary workers, on-call workers, freelancers or contractors—has
also risen from 10.1 percent of the workforce in 2005 to 15.8 percent
in 2015. 30 More than one in five adults were working more than one
job, doing informal work as well as their main job, or both, 31 with
some complaining about the lack of benefits and others welcoming
the flexibility and earnings offered by this new “gig economy.” Meanwhile,
population mobility, long a driver of economic advancement
in the United States, has decreased for reasons that are not yet understood,
exacerbating the unevenness of economic opportunity. 32
In contemporary U.S. politics, Chinese competition is often cited
as the chief culprit in eliminating millions of well-paying factory jobs
27 Anthony P. Carnevale, Tamara Jayasundera, and Artem Gulish, Six Million Missing Jobs:
The Lingering Pain of the Great Recession, Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Center
on Education and the Workforce, 2015.
28 There is considerable debate over the causes of the decline in labor force participation,
some more worrisome than others. Factors include young people staying in school longer,
young people unable to find jobs, more people retiring at a normal rate due to population
aging, more demoralized older people retiring early and/or more people applying for disability
payments. There is broad support for policies to improve the labor force participation
rate as a means to boosting economic growth. See Ravi Balakrishnan et al., “Lost Workers,”
International Monetary Fund, Finance and Development, Vol. 52, No. 3, September 2015.
29 Shatz, 2016, p. 20.
30 Lawrence F. Katz and Alan B. Krueger, The Rise and Nature of Alternative Work Arrangements
in the United States, 1995—2015, Harvard University, Princeton University and
National Bureau of Economic Research, March 29, 2016.
31 Consumer and Community Development Research Section of the Federal Reserve
Board’s Division of Consumer and Community Affairs, 2016.
32 Raven Molloy et al., “Understanding Declining Fluidity in the U.S. Labor Market,”
Brookings Paper on Economic Activity Conference Draft, March 10–11, 2016.