Policy- A top Biden economist said the president is looking to fix the labor shortage by making it easier to get back to work.
- That includes giving people childcare options and lowering "costs for consumers."
There are myriad reasons Americans haven't returned to their jobs after leaving throughout the pandemic — but the White House says it's looking for ways to help them get back to work.
That's according to The Wall Street Journal's Annie Linskey, who reported this week that the top economic officials in the Biden administration want to push policies like childcare and eldercare benefits to make jobs more feasible, and more enticing.
"Where are places where we can lower price pressures in the economy, lower costs for consumers and increase the productive potential of the economy?" Brian Deese, the director of the White House's National Economic Council, asked The Journal. "The things that we will prioritize and focus on will be in that area."
Deese is also referencing the high inflation that the Federal Reserve is fighting to curb, and that Americans are struggling to keep up with, adding that the White House will potentially take administrative actions to reduce the price of housing.
Deese was not specific about what White House economists' plans would be beyond that, but he suggested childcare was key to making sure that parents would be able to work. Many women left the workforce to take on the brunt of childcare duties due to the shortage of workers in the field.
"When we look at areas where we can make progress, one is on helping working parents," Mr. Deese said. "Providing quality, affordable child care actually helps to reduce cost burdens on families and gets more people working."
Such provisions may be hard for Biden to pull off after losing control of the House to Republicans this year. Even when Democrats held a slim majority in both the House and the Senate, Biden ended up removing stipulations to ease childcare and eldercare costs from his Build Back Better agenda, which eventually passed without them in the form of a much leaner Inflation Reduction Act.
Why some Americans aren't working
Childcare won't fix all the labor market's challenges. Men in their prime working years, or those between 25 to 54, have fled the workforce since February 2020. And many older workers are choosing to retire.
Deese bets that few growth opportunities is also one reason people don't keep working.
"One of the things that I hear over and over in the implementation of big projects like infrastructure is that we need a better workforce-training model to actually connect people who want to get into new high-growth careers with the skills and the opportunity to do so," he said.
In one McKinsey survey of 12,000 workers from July, 41% of respondents said that the lack of opportunity for upward mobility was the number-one reason why they left.
"The COVID-19 pandemic has led more and more people to reevaluate what they want from a job—and from life—which is creating a large pool of active and potential workers who are shunning the traditionalist path," the researchers wrote.
That's a sentiment echoed by a recent report from the Boston Fed, which found that the decline of men's labor force participation over the last four decades has been largely driven by working-age men without a four-year college degree. According to the study, more men are opting for no paycheck at all, due to the "status shame" of of limited pay growth across many years.
And although the US is back to record-high employment, it likely won't rebound fully, due to truncated immigration levels, deaths from COVID, and all those workers retiring.
So the Biden administration may be on to something: making work accessible and rewarding for those who decided the hustle isn't worth their time and energy might be their best bet.