[abe_m]

While official unemployment is low, that is only people actively looking for work. Labour force participation is way down from it's highs when it peaked in the late 90's. From a peak of around 67%, the US is currently at 62%[1], and the fall off corresponds to the time when imports from China were rising hard and it was the trendy thing to do among executives to shutdown US plants and move production to China.

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART/

Many people and towns that lost work in the manufacturing shut downs still don't have replacement work, and I think part of that is we lost a lot of low-skilled labour work as the factories left.

Now a question would be, if the work does come back, will it be low skilled enough to be able to hire the same pool of people formerly employed?

[graeme]

Unfortunately I think that's just aging of the population. There's no upper age limit in that calculation. It includes retirees as "not in the labour force".

If you look at the participation rate of people aged 25-54 it's near all time highs.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300060

[abe_m]

Something is weird there, as the 55+ was increasing in the period of about 1995 to 2010, while the overall was down in point 2000, and 25-54 was flat. Weird.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11324230