Here’s How The National Worker Shortage Affects Virginia

VIRGINIA — Employers in Virginia and every other U.S. state face unprecedented challenges as they try to fill open jobs, according to a new report from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that says the nation’s worker shortage has become a crisis.

Even if every unemployed person in the country found a job, it still wouldn’t solve the worker shortage crisis, according to the Chamber, a large business lobbying group. Data updated at the end of September shows 9.6 million job openings, but only 6.4 million unemployed workers, the group said.

The Chamber broke states’ worker shortages into four categories — least severe, severe, more severe and most severe — in the report that crunched data on job openings, unemployment rates, labor force participation rates, quit rates and hire rates.

Virginia fell into the more severe category with a worker shortage index of 0.57, which is based on the number of available workers for every job opening. States with the highest ratio have more workers available to fill jobs.

In Virginia, there are 57 available workers for every 100 open jobs.

Here are the statistics, updated in September, used to compute that index for the Commonwealth:

• Job Openings: 245,000
• Unemployed Workers: 112,959
• Labor Force Participation Rate: 66.7
• Unemployment Rate: 2.5
• Quit Rate: 2.4
• Hiring Rate: 4.2

Prior to the pandemic, Virginia’s labor market was relatively healthy, the report said. The state had 73 workers for every 100 open jobs, and there were more workers being hired into more jobs than leaving them. The state's unemployment rate was far lower than the national figure at 3.5%, and its labor force participation rate was significantly higher than the national rate of 63.4%.

Virginia’s worker shortage lags behind both its pre-pandemic levels and the nation’s current average. However, Virginia’s labor force participation rate has fully rebounded, and is now 1 percentage point higher than it was in February 2020.

The hiring rate in Virginia has surpassed the quit rate since January 2020, and Virginia boasts a low unemployment rate. These trends are promising for employers, who have a surplus of 307,000 job openings among a labor shortage.

The vast majority of states have more job openings today than in early 2020.

Only a dozen states — Alaska, Arizona, Florida, Illinois, New Jersey, New York, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, Texas, Utah and Virginia — have a higher percentage of their labor force working than before the pandemic.

Overall, U.S. employers have lost 1.9 million workers since February 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic upended workplaces. Today, only 62.6 percent of working-age Americans are employed, 0.7 percentage points below pre-pandemic levels.

Early retirements, increased savings and immigration at the lowest level in decades are among factors contributing to the exodus, the business group said. Also, a 2022 survey of unemployed workers who lost their jobs during the pandemic said the need to care for children or other family members made it difficult or impossible to return to work. Entrepreneurship has soared, too, with nearly 10 million new business applications and, in 2020 alone, more than 4 million new businesses were started.

One significant contributor to the worker shortage was a sharp decline in immigration from 2020 to 2021. Only 247,000 people legally entered the United States that year, down 76 percent from the decade high of 1,049,000 immigrants from 2015 to 2016, according to the lobbying group, which lists legal immigration reform among its legislative priorities.

In short, the “great reshuffle” has worked its way into workplace vernacular along with the “great resignation” during the workforce shift, the Chamber said, noting “the hashtag #quittok even went viral on social media as users posted about quitting their jobs in search for more free time and better opportunities.”

About 3.5 million people quit their jobs in August, the report said, but the hiring rate has outpaced the quit rate since November 2020.