The Jobless Recovery

No matter how the government calculates the unemployment rate, the employment rate is still very very low for a recovery.
The simple fact is employment is not growing like it should in a recovery. Why?

1) Anytime you have a financial panic, the growth will be slower. This has been well documented by several studies and needs no further comment.
2) Specific actions by the Obama Administration has lead to lower employment. The health care act and government regulations in general have can lead to increased cost of employing people. Especially if the regulations deal with firing or cutting employment, firms will respond by decreasing the hiring of employees.
3) Technology has increased the productivity of employees which is a long term good for the economy, but a short term drag.
If this were true, then once economic growth increases above two percent, employment growth should pick up. If employees are very productive, it will make sense to hire them, so they increase profits. Anytime a person is more productive and the firm can increase it's sales, it will make sense to hire more people. Increases in productivity are GOOD for employment.

But as the chart below shows, employment increases just have not happened. Clearly something very basic is wrong.