93 Million Non-Working Americans
The United States Bureau of Labor Statistics defines people not in the work force as being 16 years and older who are not employed and have not “made specific efforts to find employment sometime during the 4-week period ending with the reference week.”
According to the BLS, there are 93,175,000 Americans of working age who are not in the labor force.
That’s almost 30% of the total U.S. population of 320,772,000.
If the number of non-working Americans were a separate country, drawing on data from the CIA World FactBook, that country would come in at No. 16 in total population. That outpaces the population of France, the UK, Egypt, Turkey, Thailand, Germany and many others, according to the CIA.
By sheer population count, the country closest to it would be Vietnam, whose total population is 93,421,835, according to the CIA. The country of Vietnam has one of the world’s lowest unemployment rates, coming in at 1.9% at the end of 2013 according to the website www.internations.org.
