Who's in and out of the labour force?

As economists, the labour force is an important deal.

I grew sick of teaching it from scratch each year and instead filmed a lesson of me going through who’s in and who’s out (see below). It’s a bit messy but I think it works just fine. As a bonus, you’ll get a sneak peak into my eco classroom.

In an economy, we need to know about the labour force. This helps us work out unemployment and participation rates and so much more. Step inside my classroom and get a sense of who's in and who's out of the labour force calculations. I filmed this with an awesome Swivl and my iPhone 6s.

If you were going to use this, maybe as some pre-learning, I think it’d be valuable to get students to construct a very simple table with two columns:

• Column one: Who’s in (and why)

• Column two: Who’s out (and why)

By doing this first, you could have some more interesting discussions about the concept of the labour force in class, rather than using valuable class time to set out a series of accepted facts.

If you use this, please let me know how it goes!