Millions of workers are still missing from the U.S. labor force three years after COVID-19 surfaced, and economists are scratching their heads as to how big the gap actually is and where all these people went.
One estimate found at least 2.1 million who retired earlier then expected. Another calculated a shortfall of 2 million immigrants at the height of the pandemic. Other research pointed to a million or more out of work because of long COVID.
There’s not even an agreement on the overall size of the hole — how many more Americans would be working in 2023 had it not been for the pandemic. That’s a problem because officials at the Federal Reserve need to know if Americans are temporarily or permanently out of the labor force so they can set monetary policy, said Anna Wong, chief U.S. economist at Bloomberg Economics.
