(WXYZ) — In tonight's 7 UpFront we're looking at the trouble some businesses are having hiring new employees.
We're being joined by the President of the W.E. Upjohn Institute or Employment Research Michael Horrigan to talk about it.
You can see the full interview in the video player above.
"When you look at people who are on unemployment insurance, people who are out of the labor force, I think there are a number of factors," Horrigan says. "Some, probably, are still scared because of the pandemic, absolutely. I think others are looking at what they can earn on unemployment insurance versus what they can earn on a job, although in some sense a job is a job and the UI benefits will eventually run out. I think the economy is changing. But, I think another narrative that is really important is the access to childcare, is the difficulty of some people with family responsibilities. Nationwide, taking a look, I have data that goes for the entire nation, the number of people citing childcare as a problem in terms of being able to get back into the labor force more than tripled between February of last year and February of this year, from 80,000 to over 255,000. And the number of people citing childcare, or family responsibilities just more generally, that went up from 725,000 to just under a million people. So we've got some really access issues, and just in Michigan, for example, the number of childcare centers decreased from 2018 from over 9,200 to just over 6,800 by the fall of 2020."
