How Many People Dropped Out of the Labor Force in 2020?
Looking past the unemployment rate and calculating how many people dropped out of the labor force in McHenry County
While the unemployment rate is perhaps the most well-known metric for looking at jobs, it doesn’t tell the whole story. The unemployment rate measures the percentage of people in the labor force (people over 16 working or actively looking for work) who are not currently employed. But it doesn’t measure people who have stopped looking for work.
The COVID-19 pandemic sent the unemployment rate across the country skyrocketing and forced millions of people to drop out of the workforce. You can see more about how the labor force in McHenry County shrank and grew over the course of the year in the chart below.
Overall, McHenry County’s labor force shrank by 5,008 people over the course of 2020.
The labor force took its biggest hit in April 2020, when more than 7,396 people dropped out and the unemployment rate shot up to 16.4%. When people drop out of the labor force, the unemployment rate generally goes down because those people are no longer counted. This makes the drop in labor force and spike in unemployment rate in March 2020 look even more dire.
You can see the labor force made a recovery in June 2020 (when restrictions loosened) but dropped by about 7,000 by July.
The labor force dropped below 155,000 for the first time since December 2002. That is even more alarming considering the county population was just 260,075 at the 2000 Census—18.3% less than the 2019 population of 307,774.