The Stay-at-Homes

As John F. Kennedy pointed with pride last week to the latest decrease in the unemployment rate (see THE NATION), U.S. economists puzzled over some employment statistics that the President failed to mention. For years, the economists have predicted that because of the baby boom of the 1940s, the number of Americans looking for jobs would swell to unmanageable proportions in the 1960s.

According to this theory, the number of people working and looking for work in the U.S. should have increased by about 850,000 last year. Instead, the nation's labor force last month stood at only 70.3 million people--28,000 less than a year earlier.

While the experts believe that this sudden halt in the growth of the work force may be a temporary phenomenon rather than the beginning of a trend, they are concerned enough to want to pinpoint the groups responsible for the shrinkage.

Among 1961's new stay-at-homes: > Men over 60 dropped out of the labor force at a high rate, largely because of the new social security provision that lets them retire with benefits at 62.

> More boys under 19 stayed on in school --which cut the proportion of young people seeking jobs by 2.3% last year.

> The number of women over 45 returning to work because their children had left home dropped to an abnormally low 12,000.

> A whopping 456,000 farm workers--mostly elderly men, part-time help or the wives and daughters of farmers--disappeared from the labor market as uneconomic farms closed down.

Why aren't the new stay-at-homes out looking for work? The likeliest reason is that, between the effects of automation and the slowness of the recovery, the U.S.

has not been creating new jobs as fast as it usually does in a period of economic upturn. In the first twelve months of recovery from the 1958 recession, more than 1,800,000 new non-farm jobs opened up. Last month, at the same stage of the current recovery, there were only 1,260,000 more non-farm jobs than at the recession's trough.

As a result, argues A.F.L.-C.I.O. President George Meany, marginal workers such as married women, the very young, and the elderly are too discouraged to seek work. This, says Meany bitterly, "helps the unemployment statistics some, but it doesn't help the unemployment problem at all." Labor Department Manpower Expert Seymour Wolfbein, however, believes that the plight of the marginal worker has its bright side: if young people concentrate on getting more education and if less efficient workers stay at home, the U.S. work force should increase its productivity, to the ultimate benefit of the whole economy.

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