The drop in August’s unemployment rate isn’t particularly good news for the economy—it’s driven mostly by nearly 400,000 people dropping out of the labor force, rather than more people finding jobs.
But those dropping out aren’t so much the discouraged 30-, 40- or 50-year-olds. In fact, the Labor Department said there was a modest decline in the overall number of discouraged job seekers.
The drop is because so many young adults—ages 16 to 24—are no longer looking for work.
There were 453,000 fewer young adults with jobs in August than in July. But despite that plunge, only 27,000 more young people were looking for new jobs. Most apparently stopped looking and left the labor force.
As a result, the percentage of young people who are counted in the labor force fell to its lowest level since 1955. And the unemployment rate for young adults rose to 16.8 percent from 16.4 percent in July.
We are seeing a slow increase in the number of young adults—especially in the 18-25 age group—who migrate towards direct selling opportunities. What we’ve found is that working for themselves provides a level of freedom that this generation is accustomed to, having grown up with technology and information just a click away. While buzz words like “work-from-home” and “network marketing” are not necessarily attractive to Gen Yers, “schedule flexibility,” “personal business scalability” and “creative social networking” are very attractive to this generation. Once direct selling companies embrace some of the key sought after attributes of the Gen Y crowd in their business strategy and representation, we will surely see an increase of this trend out of the job market into the personal business “work for myself” realm.
More on this topic can be found here.
