The Male Man

When you picture heavy-duty assembly lines, driving the big rigs, steel mills, coal mines, operating heavy equipment, fishing, dirty maintenance work, oil-drilling… the muscle of American manufacturing and resource-extraction industries… whom do you see doing the work? High school graduates (and a few dropouts) with no desire or notion to attend college? Folks raised in small towns where they simply follow in their parents’ footsteps, generation after generation? Men? How politically incorrect, as women are breaking into all levels of hard labor, but… it’s still statistically overwhelmingly correct.

But as manufacturing slides into outsourcing or automation, those solid, well-paying, mostly-union jobs are disappearing. The bankruptcy of two of the three big US automakers was the biggest nail in the “blue collar, traditional” job coffin. It was a big slam to the Rust belt. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, union membership in the private sector has fallen to a barely relevant 6.7% of the workforce. Unions are thriving in the public sector and moribund everywhere else.

The jobs that are coming online, the “job growth” the government is bragging about, unfortunately are generating lower end service sector, hospitality, food services and low-skill construction work paying between minimum wage and $10+ dollars an hour. Add part-time and contract work to the mix, and the pay-benefit packages are downright miserable, hardly the $20-$40+/hour plus full benefits the old-line manufacturing/extraction sector used to pay. Under-educated men are now competing with college grads who are will to take such low pay as “all we can get.” The response of those displaced male workers who cannot find anything remotely close to their old pay levels has been downright depressing.

“Working, in America, is in decline. The share of prime-age men — those 25 to 54 years old — who are not working has more than tripled since the late 1960s, to 16 percent. More recently, since the turn of the century, the share of women without paying jobs has been rising, too. The United States, which had one of the highest employment rates among developed nations as recently as 2000, has fallen toward the bottom of the list.

“As the economy slowly recovers from the Great Recession, many of those men and women are eager to find work and willing to make large sacrifices to do so. Many others, however, are choosing not to work, according to a New York Times/CBS News/Kaiser Family Foundation poll that provides a detailed look at the lives of the 30 million Americans 25 to 54 who are without jobs.

“Many men, in particular, have decided that low-wage work will not improve their lives, in part because deep changes in American society have made it easier for them to live without working. These changes include the availability of federal disability benefits; the decline of marriage, which means fewer men provide for children; and the rise of the Internet, which has reduced the isolation of unemployment.

“At the same time, it has become harder for men to find higher-paying jobs. Foreign competition and technological advances have eliminated many of the jobs in which high school graduates … once could earn $40 an hour, or more. The poll found that 85 percent of prime-age men without jobs do not have bachelor’s degrees. And 34 percent said they had criminal records, making it hard to find any work.” New York Times, December 11^th.

Folks who aren’t looking for work don’t show up in the basic unemployment statistics. Because they are net “takers” and lower-level “spenders,” these chronic unemployed actually drag the economy downwards and slow the real recovery, that everyone is seeking, way down. There’s a reason so many Americans are pessimistic about their futures and the well-being of their nation. We all feel the margins of our recovery as truly slim and not reflective of the values we have always placed on those willing to work hard. We just don’t trust the numbers… justifiably.

For those chronically unemployed, former hard workers, life is anything but joyful. “For most unemployed men, life without work is not easy. In follow-up interviews, about two dozen men described days spent mostly at home, chewing through dwindling resources, relying on friends, strangers and the federal government. The poll found that 30 percent had used food stamps, while 33 percent said they had taken food from a nonprofit or religious group.

“They are unhappy to be out of work and eager to find new jobs. They are struggling both with the loss of income and a loss of dignity. Their mental and physical health is suffering… Yet 44 percent of men in the survey said there were jobs in their area they could get but were not willing to take.” NY Times. In the end, the austerity measures adopted by Congress in the recent budget compromise, pulling back on training/education, research and infrastructure, will simply pull us down another giant notch, just as unemployment statistics look good until you ask the bigger questions: how much are these new jobs paying and who has been pushed out of the system.

I’m Peter Dekom, and when a nation just stops caring about vastly numbers of its own citizens, how long can that society sustain?