Chapter 5: The American Work Force in the Eighties: New Problems and Policy Interests Require Improved Labor Force Data

In: The annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Band 453, Heft 1, S. 123-129

Abstract

Social Indicators III contains a wealth of information on the nation's employment and unemployment trends in the postwar period. This chapter examines the particular problems of rising unemployment and diminishing productivity growth in the 1970s and their relation to demographic changes in the labor force of this period. The expansion of youth and adult women's participation in the work force during the 1970s is described as compounding the problems of an economy wracked by energy shortages and inflation. Pressures from this source are expected to diminish in the decade ahead. The prospects for improvements in the economy related to this are reviewed along with the likelihood of new problems emerging to affect the American work force of the 1980s. A better understanding of these and other labor market problems in the decade ahead will be one of the payoffs to changes planned in the nation's labor force data system in response to the recommendations of a presidential commission. These changes are described.