Steven Ruggles on the Coming Labor Shortage and What It Means

Wages for young workers peaked in 1973. Real wages for young men did not fully recover until after 2015, reaching a low of approximately 25% below the 1973 peak — a 42-year stagnation caused not just by the baby boom entering the labor force but by that cohort continuing to occupy jobs for decades afterward, suppressing demand for new workers. Now the boomers are retiring. Births fell 17% between 2007 and 2024. And a University of Minnesota demographer projects that net entry into the labor force will drop below zero in the 2030s for the first time in American history. On today's episode of America's Work Force Union Podcast, MacArthur Fellow and University of Minnesota Regents Professor Steven Ruggles discusses his paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences — The Pig in the Python: US Decennial Labor Flows and Economic Opportunity, 1910–2040 — and what the coming demographic transformation means for wages, union organizing and the workers who will enter the labor force over the next 15 years.