Some stark numbers illustrate the workforce shortage employers face in every region across all industries.
In May there were
9.3 million workers unemployed and 9.2 million job openings. As the number of unemployed closes in on the number of job openings, employers will have to look beyond the native workforce. May’s Worker Availability Ratio–the ratio of available workers to job openings–was 1.2, similar to what it was before the pandemic.
The U.S. can’t meet demand for seasonal workers. In the first half of FY 2021, the Labor Department certified that American employers had
126,943 seasonal employment opportunities they could not fill with American workers. That is almost twice as large as the statutory cap for the H-2B temporary worker program. This affects landscapers, seafood processors, forestry companies, construction firms, among many others, many of which are small businesses.
The average number of workers available for every open job is half what it has been for the past 20 years. The government sector faces the biggest shortage of all, with 5 times as many open jobs as workers to fill them.
The America Works Report: Quantifying the Nation s Workforce Crisis
We hear every day from our member companies of every size and industry, across nearly every state that they’re facing unprecedented challenges trying to find workers to fill jobs.
But just how widespread is this problem? Which states and which sectors have been hit the hardest? And how do we begin to address this national economic crisis and put more Americans back to work?
That’s what we set out to discover. By analyzing more than two decades worth of federal jobs and employment data and conducting surveys of top industry association economists and local and state chamber of commerce leaders across the country, we examined the current state of the American workforce and the monumental challenges employers are facing across the country.