Letter: Report doesn't mention Nevada's ailing labor force

Nevada’s Department of Employment, Training and Rehabilitation just released its November jobs report, and the numbers are generally encouraging.

The Silver State now boasts an unemployment rate of 5.2 percent, evidencing big gains from its peak of nearly 14 percent in 2010.

Absent from the report, however, is any mention of Nevada’s ailing labor force, which has consistently shrunk as a proportion of the state’s population in a decades-long and worrisome trend.

In 1999, Nevada’s labor force participation rate was 69.1 percent; by 2016, it was 63 percent.

Because the unemployment rate does not account for those who have stopped looking for work, any decrease in the relative size of the labor force artificially inflates employment numbers.

Thus, the continued migration from the labor force has unfortunately blunted some of what would otherwise be good news from the latest jobs report.

At the Nevada Policy Research Institute, we are committed to diagnosing the causes of this troubling pattern and articulating labor policies to reverse it.

Daniel Honchariw, policy researcher and analyst, Nevada Policy Research Institute, Reno