If The Economy Is Recovering, Why Is The Labor Force Participation Rate At A 36 Year Low?Michael Snyder Yes, it may be hard to believe, but there are more than 100 million working age Americans that are not employed right now. Needless to say, this is not a sign of a healthy economy, and it is a huge reason why dependence on the government has soared to absolutely unprecedented levels. When people cant take care of themselves, they need someone else to take care of them. If the percentage of people in the labor force continues to decline like it has been, what is that going to mean for the future of our society? The chart below shows the changes in the civilian labor force participation rate since 1980. As you can see, the rate steadily rose between 1980 and 2000, but since then it has generally been declining. In particular, this decline has greatly accelerated since the beginning of the last recession We have never seen an extended precipitous decline of this nature before. But instead of admitting that we have a very serious problem on our hands, many mainstream economists are dismissing this decline as structural in nature. For example, check out the following excerpt from a recent Reuters article But there is a major flaw in this analysis. It turns out that older Americans are the only group for which employment numbers have actually been going up. I really like howZero Hedge made this point the other day Yes, Baby Boomers are hitting retirement age. But that does not explain why the labor force participation rate numbers for younger groups have been going down. Each month, the U.S. economy has to add somewhere between 100,000 and 150,000 jobs just to keep up with population growth. Since job creation has been tepid at best in recent years, the only way that the government has been able to get the official unemployment rate to steadily go down has been to remove millions upon millions of Americans from the labor force. According to the official government numbers, since 2007 768,000 jobs have been added to the economy, but a whopping 13 million Americans have been added to the numbers of those not in the labor force. As a result, the official unemployment rate has magically been declining. But the truth is that our employment crisis has not been solved at all. And it isnt just the number of jobs that we need to be concerned about. We are also dealing with a multi-year decline in the quality of our jobs. In fact,the Wall Street Journal just reported that 34 percent of all U.S. workers are freelancers now In other words, about a third of all workers in the country are temps at this point. I dont know about you, but to me that is an extremely alarming statistic. If the economy really was recovering, this would not be happening. And as millions upon millions of Americans are being forced out of the official labor force, an increasing number of people are turning to the underground economy. For example, in some of our major cities we are witnessing a rise in the number of street vendors. The following is an excerpt from a recent Los Angeles Times article entitled More Angelenos are becoming street vendors amid weak economy In order to have a strong middle class, we need middle class jobs. If our labor force participation rate continues to fall and the quality of our jobs continues to decline, the middle class will continue to shrink. For much more on this, please see my previous article entitled 30 stats to show to anyone that does not believe the middle class is being destroyed. But our authorities never seem to want to admit what our real problems are. Instead, they love to come up with alternative theories for our economic struggles. One of the latest theories being put forward by the Federal Reserve is that the economy is not moving along like it should because ordinary Americans arehoarding money This seems completely absurd to me. From what I can see, most families are just doing their best to survive from month to month these days. I certainly dont see a lot of people hoarding money. What do you think? Please feel free to share your thoughts by posting a comment below This article first appeared here at the Economic Collapse Blog. Michael Snyder is a writer, speaker and activist who writes and edits his own blogs The American Dream and Economic Collapse Blog. Follow him on Twitter here. 