Breaking Down the Labor Shortage

Tom Barkin

Speech from Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond

Abstract: Inflation has become the focus of conversation. But in its shadow — and partially pulling the strings — is tightness in the labor market. Employers continue to struggle to bring in new workers and keep existing ones. Job openings far outnumber individuals looking for work. Absenteeism is elevated due to COVID-19. Jobs are still down by nearly three million. Immigration remains far below its pre-COVID-19 trend. As a result of this tightness, wages are up 4.5 percent, the highest year-over-year growth in over 20 years.1

Keywords: employment; and; labor; markets (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022-03-03
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.richmondfed.org/press_room/speeches/th ... 2022/barkin_20220303 Speech (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:fip:r00034:101272

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Speech from Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Matt Myers ().