from the Economic Policy Institute's website: "The labor force participation rate (the share of working-age people who either have a job or are jobless but actively seeking work) has dropped by more than two percentage points since the start of the Great Recession in Dec. 2007."

click here for a link to this article, which includes a chart and a hotlink to a related article "Labor force participation: Cyclical versus structural changes since the start of the Great Recession" * http://www.epi.org/publication/missing-workers-unemployment-rate-understatin... *