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The Little Rock Regional Chamber last week touted record employment levels for the area, with the number of people employed in June reaching 370,420, up 3.6% from the 357,564 employed in June 2023.
And Arkansas economist Michael Pakko noted in July on his blog that Arkansas’ labor force participation rate has risen by 0.3 percentage points during the past three months to 57.7%, nearly equal to the rate at the beginning of 2020, before the pandemic, of 57.9%.
That’s the good news. The bad news, at least for employers, is that the U.S. is facing a labor shortage. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce reported last month that there were 8.1 million job openings in the U.S. but only 6.8 million unemployed workers.
There are many reasons behind the labor shortage, which is likely to continue. Looming large among those reasons are an aging workforce, a declining birth rate and the difficulty in finding affordable child care.
Immigration reform, with an emphasis on legal immigration, could help alleviate the U.S. worker shortage, but that assumes a president and a Congress willing to work together.
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