Men at Work?

My consulting friend Dennis Duitch (DuitchConsulting.com) brought up an interesting if not disturbing employment trend that is taking place in the United States: as manufacturing and a whole pile of servicing work moves overseas, and as U.S. corporations slim down their costs significantly by combining moving operations overseas with cutting legions of middle managers, the percentage of males in the workforce is plunging. He provides this quote in support of this premise:

“WORKING MEN ARE DISAPPEARING FORM THE AMERICAN WORK FORCE. The portion of men holding any job – full or part-time – is now around 63%, lowest level since WW II. Forty years ago, 95% of men in the prime working years (age 25 to 35) worked; today it’s just above 81%. Moreover, their median wages have dropped nearly 27% during those decades, after inflation. What’s happened? ‘The economic downturn has exacerbated this long-term trend: (1) Companies have cut costs by moving manufacturing jobs, routine computer programming, and even simple legal work out of the country… (2) The production jobs that remain are increasingly mechanized and demand higher skills… (3) A strapped public education system leaves many young men unprepared for this workplace (let alone college)… (4) Technology and efforts to reduce the number of layers within corporations are leaving fewer middle-management jobs… and (5) women, who’ve made up a majority of college students for three decades, are adapting better to a data-driven economy that values education and collaborative skills more than muscle.’” [BLOOMBERG BUSINESSWEEK – Aug 29, 11]

Combine these realities with a political system that not only has fractured along party lines and deadlocked but has completely abandoned any semblance of long-term goals to focus on band aids and blame. Congress and the President have literally been forced to play towards the 2012 elections and nothing else. If these elected officials don’t make it past this seminal vote, they are out, and keeping their jobs is overwhelmingly a greater priority to every one of them, from the President on down, than preparing the United States for the future.

The President’s expensive job bill drills down somewhat on infrastructure and a lot on job-related tax incentives… Employers are rewarded to add jobs, but jobs to do what? To build products and provide services to whom? With business and consumer confidence at an all-time low, exactly who is going to purchase what these new jobs create? America is sitting at home, with substantial unemployment or under-employment, doing nothing. Television viewership is up to an all-time high, according to consumer metrics company Nielsen, to 5 hours and 13 minutes per day on average.

With nothing but remedial and short-term fixes in the works, with unemployment for the youngest workers bordering on 25% (46% if you happen to be an inner-city African American), what exactly are we doing for the future? Just cutting the budget on educational programs alone is decimating on long-term prospects. And for those at the bottom of the American economy, things have gone from bad to much worse: “The Census Bureau reports the number of Americans in poverty jumped to 15.1 percent in 2010, a 17-year high. About 46.2 million people, or nearly 1 in 6, were in poverty. That’s up from 43.6 million, or 14.3 percent, in 2009. It was the highest level since 1993… The number of people lacking health insurance increased to 49.9 million, a new high after revisions were made to 2009 figures. Losses were due mostly to working-age Americans who lost employer-provided insurance in the weak economy.” Washington Post, September 13^th.

And look at the housing mess; nothing is happening and the situation is getting worse. The very banks we bailed out are squeezing underwater homeowners, making resetting mortgages exceptionally difficult. Who forgot that so much of American hope, self-esteem and motivation has come from homeownership. What’s being done to help homeowners?!

Think of the holes in our democratic system. Members of the House of Representatives, who have two-year terms, are perpetually running for office. “Long-term” has been discarded as irrelevant to such political realities. A state like California, with about 37 million people, has exactly the same number of U.S. Senators (two) as does South Dakota, with a few over 800 thousand people. Anyone who believes that America is the land of “one person, one vote” has to explain this to me. That Ben Franklin “New Jersey compromise” to protect sparsely populated agricultural states from the densely populated manufacturing states may have worked a couple of hundred years ago, but makes no continuing sense in today’s world.

The Supreme Court took the lid off corporate and union contributions to political action committees, and with cheap Senators in smaller states (it costs a whole lot less to elect a Senator in South Dakota than New York or California) and most of our elected representatives always out raising money for their perpetual election efforts, special interests have never had it so good. If a law passes and they don’t like what it says, they can apply their “we have too much regulation” and budget reduction lobbying to make sure that such laws are never implemented. They have the money to make that message appear everywhere. The Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation has resulted in about 10% of the financial regulations that Congress expected because of budget cuts to the regulatory agencies.

Wall Streeters are doing today exactly the kind of debt-packaging that got us into this mess in the first place with no one making them stop. Our individual credit habit, encouraged by this phenomenon, has resume to “horrible.” “According to CardHub.com's, Q2 2011 Credit Card Debt Study, U.S. consumers accumulated a staggering $18.4 billion in credit card debt in the second quarter -- 66% more than they accumulated in the same quarter a year ago, and 368% more than in the second quarter of 2009. Based on the study, Americans will end 2011 with around $54 billion more in credit card debt than they began the year with.” DailyFinance.com, September 12^th. Are we living today as if there were no tomorrow? Deeply troubling, and yet we want folks to spend more to create more jobs. Scary, isn’t it?

In the end, what is really needed – and what is extraordinarily unlikely to take place – is deep reform, from our Constitution to our most basic financial institutions. The mega-financial conglomerate structures have failed us profoundly. Size and sanity must be restored. The big boyz need to be broken up and returned to the era before the relevant provisions of Glass-Steagall (which separated commercial banking from investment banking and securities trading) were repealed. Our Constitution must reflect “one person, one vote,” our Congressional terms need to be longer (but perhaps with term limits), and free and unregulated speech accorded under the First Amendment must be relegated to natural persons and not mega-wealthy companies that can buy advertising and influence with virtually no limits. And how about a one-term, six year president?

I’m Peter Dekom, and I wonder how deep our misery must be, how profoundly our loss of our way of life must fall and how big the calamities of our own making must rise before such fundamental reforms are enacted?