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More grandmothers working during 'man-cession

Written by By Steve Liesman, CNBC Monday, 14 March 2011 00:00

Amid a painfully slow job recovery, one of the great mysteries of this recession has been the disappearance of several million workers from the labor force.

The decline in the participation rate — the percentage of the population who say they are part of the workforce — has eclipsed every other recession of the past 50 years.

The numbers are staggering. Since the labor force peaked in October, 2008 at 155 million, 2.4 million Americans have dropped out of the labor force. In the prior recession earlier this decade, the labor force dropped by just 600,000. Before the recession, 66% of the population said to count them in the labor force. Now, it's fallen to 64.2%.

Until now, there's been little data available on just who is leaving and who is entering the workforce. But CNBC received detailed data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and crunched the numbers on the change from October, 2008, when the workforce peaked at 155 million Americans, to the most recent report in February.

The two major findings:

• The trend of the aging of the workforce, in place before the recession, has dramatically accelerated, especially among older women.

• Younger people have fallen out of the labor force in numbers never before seen, especially younger women.

The same changes in the demographics of who's in and who's out of the workforce are obvious in the changes of those who have gotten jobs. The inescapable conclusion is that grandmothers are getting jobs and their granddaughters are not.

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