Mike Rowe has made a career by promoting the oft-overlooked jobs that keep society running via his hit TV series “Dirty Jobs.” But in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the low workforce participation rate has left many of those industries short-staffed.

“Right now, we have 7.2 million men, able-bodied men, in the prime of their working life, who are not only not working but affirmatively not looking. What they’re looking at are screens,” Mr. Rowe noted on the Nov. 23 episode of EpochTV’s “American Thought Leaders.”

“Something is afoot; something is amiss in the wide world of work,” he continued. “And as people grapple to define—or maybe redefine—what a good job is, a lot of businesses are just grasping at straws and clutching their pearls and very uncertain about what’s going to happen next vis-à-vis the workforce.”

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the national labor force participation rate dropped to 60.1 percent—its lowest level in 20 years—in April 2020. Since then, participation has yet to fully recover to its pre-pandemic level of 63.3 percent, with October’s rate of 62.7 percent marking a slight decrease from September.

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