Minorities and women, especially those in their 20s and early 30s, are returning to the workforce. They’ve been drawn back by rising wages and recruited by employers who may have bypassed them when the supply of unemployed Americans seemed inexhaustible.
For most of the recession and subsequent expansion, Labor Department figures showed fewer working-age Americans working or looking for work each month. That decline has stopped. For many Americans, particularly those left behind by a hot labor market, workforce participation is on the rise.
The rate of labor-force participation for prime-age adults (25-54) rose more in the fourth quarter of 2018 than in any quarter since 1994, part of a turnaround that started about three years ago. The rate climbed 1.1 percentage points from the end of 2015, reaching a 12-month average of 82 percent.
