I think the first place to start is the fact
that the wages have had this tremendous upheaval because of
the mix of jobs that were being created, the
first bout was a loss of low paid jobs.
And so there's, there was this composition effect and
we think wages actually peaked last spring. But when
you look at this report where you saw big gains
in leisure and hospitality, those tend to be low
paying jobs that don't see a lot of growth in
terms of months away month wage increases. You also
saw big impact in professional business services for temporary contractor
positions. So again, lower page jobs were catching
steam in the february report. That might be one
reason why wage gains were basically flat from a month
ago and it's definitely a trend to watch Neela what
if we dig into participation here? Because if you
do pull back the layers here, there's some kind
of alarming stuff in here. It was an otherwise
strong month. The labor force participation rate for female
workers drove though dropping for the first time in five
months, especially for prime age workers. That key
group, the drop was led by prime age black
women whose participation rate dropped the most since october and
for asian women, it plummeted for a second month
to the lowest level since april. How should we
be reading into that? That the work isn't done
for, there are still bottlenecks to employment and I
think that's very important to keep a look at it
even as we see this really strong healthy jobs report
, it's not like it's created equal for everybody.
And so even though omicron is fading and the pandemic
looks to be on its heels, let's hope there
are still some bottlenecks when it comes to childcare,
finding childcare, the availability of childcare, the expense
of childcare, and then it just the inflationary cost
of getting to work gasoline prices, for example,
wardrobe prices, everything is up launches up. And
so, uh, that could discourage participation if we're
seeing flat wages, but high inflation that that earned
dollar isn't going as far as it used to.
I love how we're tying all the disparate threads that
we've been talking about throughout this show together here,
just piggybacking on what tim had said, that labor
force participation rate, it's now ticked up to 62.3%
but that's still about 1% point or actually more than
1% point lower than what it was pre pandemic.
How significant is a 1% point move. It doesn't
sound like a lot, but my guess is that
it's actually quite big and it's not something that can
be made up quickly. Yeah, my perspective is
that is a move that adds up over time because
when you talk about long term economic growth that grows
for two reasons, a stronger bigger workforce that becomes
more productive and so we're starting out with with good
growth and good numbers, but it's still a smaller
workforce than it was before. The pandemic and its
smaller for the reasons we just discussed these bottlenecks that
kind of got exacerbated during the pandemic when it comes
to child care, but also the lack of immigration
because of the pandemic that really has boosted employment and
advanced economies. And so we'd like to see that
reorient and shift back where we're seeing not only domestic
employment but also people coming to the US for better
job prospects as well.