- November's jobs report found millions of Americans were looking for better employment conditions.
- Over 12 million people are either long-term unemployed, seeking work, or employed part time.
- This could point to a deeper issue, in which people aren't finding the jobs that suit them.
While the latest numbers on the state of jobs in the US showed that the US was still creeping toward recovery, one thing remained consistent: The economy isn't working for millions of workers.
Even with the Delta wave easing, the number of jobs added in November was a big miss compared with expectations. On Friday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said just 210,000 nonfarm payrolls were added in November — a far cry from the 550,000 that economists surveyed by Bloomberg forecast.
Last month, 7.4 million Americans fell into the government's official definition of being unemployed, which meant they were out of work and actively looking for a job.
Among those, 2.2 million had been unemployed for at least 27 weeks, which suggested that many prospective workers had been struggling to find a job for months.
Aside from the officially unemployed, 4.3 million Americans were employed part time because of economic reasons, like having their hours cut or being unable to find a full-time job. The 5.9 million people who weren't actively seeking work but said they wanted a job weren't seeing much improvement, either.
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Add those three groups up, and at least 12.4 million Americans just weren't getting what they needed from the economy.
Additionally, the bureau said, among those unemployed but still seeking a job, the number of people marginally attached to the labor force remained relatively unchanged, at 1.6 million.
"The number of discouraged workers, a subset of the marginally attached who believed that no jobs were available for them, was essentially unchanged over the month at 450,000," the bureau added.
That might seem at odds with reports of persistent labor shortages, but it could point to the deeper root issue: People do want to work, but the jobs available to them aren't the right fit — or their standards have changed.
Take leisure and hospitality, for example. Previously, the low-wage industry had been leading the hiring charge, with wages pushed up month after month. But last month, employment in the sector "changed little," according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and wages for nonsupervisory employees went down.
Some job switchers said in a survey, "Life is too short to stay in a job they weren't passionate about." Childcare crunches and COVID-19 fears also don't seem to be subsiding anytime soon as the number of daycare workers drops and a new variant makes its way through the US. All these factors suggest that labor shortages may be sticking around for quite some time, perhaps even forever.
"Labor shortages aren't going away anytime soon because the pandemic is still going on," Daniel Zhao, a senior economist at Glassdoor, told Insider. Even if employers slow hiring because of the pandemic, workers will still likely hold back on returning.
"The imbalance between supply and demand is still large enough that the reduction in available workers will mean that labor shortages are continuing," Zhao said.
Insider's Ben Winck previously reported the November jobs report could reflect Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell's attempt to pursue "maximum employment," rather than "full employment," which presents a risk.
Full employment is a tactic the Fed has stood by for decades. It refers to minimizing deviations when employment is too high or too low. This time around, the Fed is looking at maximum employment — an uncharted territory that hopes to push for not just low unemployment but also inclusivity and healthy wage growth. In other words, it's getting these 12 million workers into better jobs.
But sticking with that model could cause inflation to soar — something Americans across the country are experiencing right now, especially during a holiday season. And as seen with the jobs numbers, people aren't happy about it.