The real wages of workers without a four-year degree, which have been essentially stagnant for decades, have yet to fully recover from declines the Great Recession produced. The impact can be felt in sluggish wage growth that leaves many who are employed still feeling like they are falling behind.Ī range of forces lies behind the economic struggles of working Americans. Certain pockets of the country-including rural America, hard-hit manufacturing communities, and areas with long-standing and concentrated poverty-have been hit particularly hard. And of those workers, it is even worse for women, people of color, and certain other demographic groups. Many have left the labor market with no good prospects for decent employment, are underemployed, or are struggling to piece together work to barely make ends meet. The pain from this jobs shortfall is disproportionately concentrated among Americans without four-year college degrees. To offer one indicator of why: If the labor force participation rate for 16- to 65-year-olds, which is now 72.9 percent, were to return to its 2000 peak level of 76.5 percent, there would be an additional 7.6 million workers in the labor force-which would raise the unemployment rate of those aged 16 to 65 from 4.2 percent to 8.7 percent. While the headline unemployment rate does capture meaningful progress since the depths of the Great Recession, targeting a low headline unemployment rate is not sufficiently ambitious if we want to address the true labor market challenges we face. The plan we set out here is aimed at countering those forces by making good work with decent pay available for all Americans.Īnd if we look beyond the headline unemployment rate, the American economy is, in fact, still far from achieving full employment among adults in their prime working years.

Together, these forces are having economic, social, and political impacts. Moreover, upward mobility feels and is increasingly out of reach for workers who have not gone to college. If measures such as these adequately reflected the economic situation of individuals and households, we would expect that people would feel economically secure and reasonably confident about their economic prospects.īut the undeniable reality is that too many Americans feel deeply insecure about their prospects and future. Since the lowest depths of the Great Recession in 2009, the national unemployment rate has declined from double digits to below 4 percent real GDP growth has been positive in nearly every quarter and corporate profits have grown robustly. By several traditional measures, the U.S. We can see our nation’s widening chasm when we compare the stark contrast between the overall condition of the American economy and our current political climate.

The effects have been particularly pronounced in certain regions. To make matters even worse, this decline in opportunity has been further exacerbated by long-standing inequities in our country. But for millions of American workers-and particularly those without a four-year college degree-these powerful forces have exerted downward pressure on employment and wage growth, job quality, and opportunity in their communities. While the wealthiest Americans have captured the lion’s share of returns in the economy, college-educated Americans have largely continued to prosper under many of the economic forces and policies that have reshaped the 21st century economy. The United States faces a widening chasm in outlook and opportunity.

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