A number of lawmakers, agency officials and industry leaders met last week, all hoping to find the answer to one question: How to get more Alabamians into the workforce.

The meeting was the first of the newly-formed House Labor Shortage Commission, and saw its members first identify the scope of Alabama’s labor participation problem.

“We do have a crisis in our state, and it’s getting worse and worse,” said Rep. Reed Ingram, R-Matthews, the chair of the commission. “We want to be No. 1 in the country instead of 40th or less.”

While Alabama currently has a record-low unemployment rate of 2.2%, its labor participation rate of 57.4% is the third-lowest in the country, ahead of only West Virginia and Mississippi. Unlike the unemployment rate, which measures the number of unemployed adults seeking jobs, the labor participation rate measures the employment of those 16 and older.

Ed Castile, the executive director of Alabama Industrial Development Training, put into perspective the differences of the modern labor market when compared to 30 years ago.

“When we started recruiting for Mercedes in 1995, we got 63,000 applications for 20 jobs; today, if we put an ad out there for jobs, we might get a couple thousand,” Castile said. “Right before the pandemic, we were barreling in on this issue already… then the pandemic occurred, and it just exacerbated the problem.”