Thursday, February 6, 2020

The Labor Department will try this year to help states bring "discouraged" workers -- who are not included in the Bureau of Labor Statistics' unemployment tallies -- back into the workforce, according to DOL Assistant Secretary for Employment and Training John Pallasch, who acknowledged that labor force participation is a problem. "The only way we're going to be able to feed the need of employers is by pulling in those folks that are not a part of the workforce," Pallasch said at a National Skills Convention conference in Washington. He said his office hasn't "done a good job in terms of defining and providing technical assistance to the states on how exactly they go out and they engage that population, so that's another thing we're going to be working on in the near future." [Politico]