Man Overboard!

Once upon a time, all men of working age… worked. We called that time the 1950s. “The ‘participation rate’ for men ages 25 to 54 stood at 97.7% in early 1956, but drifted downward to a post-war record low of 88.4% at the end of 2012. (It ticked up very slightly at the start of this year to 88.6%.)” CNN.com, June 19^th. The recession was devastating – pushing the number below 90% for the first time since measurements began – but the trend lines had already begun pushing the percentage of men in the workforce downwards long before that debacle.

“So where have all the men workers gone? … Some went into prison. Others are on disability. And still others can’t find jobs and have simply given up looking…  The trend is particularly pronounced among the less educated. As the job market shifted away from blue-collar positions that required only a high-school degree to more skilled labor, many men were left behind, labor analysts say. It's harder these days to find well-paying jobs in manufacturing, production and other fields traditionally dominated by men without college diplomas.

“But college men are leaving, too. The participation rate of those older than 25 and holding at least bachelor's degree fell to 80.2% in May, down from 87.2% in May 1992…  ‘The proportion of guys doing nothing has risen,’ said Gary Burtless, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.” CNN.com. Too many men with advanced degrees actually prefer to remain idle rather than accept the lower-level jobs that are available. And once a worker goes on disability, very, very few ever return to the workforce.

Prison was a minor statistic for those born immediately after WWII: 1.9% of those white males and 9% of those black males had been incarcerated by 2004. Contrast that with those born three decades later: the numbers rose to 3.3% and 20.7% respectively. And in a recession, those with prison records don’t get back into even slightly good jobs.

The ups and downs of recessionary and boom times has wiggled the numbers a bit, but the overall trend has been a steady decline. Buying power for average Americans who do work has also steadily declined, year-by-year, since 2002.

What’s the message here? What do these numbers really tell us? Folks just don’t have the same expectations that past generations have had. Global competition has moved manufacturing jobs overseas in droves… but in a stunning twist of fate, the fiber optic trunk that wraps around this planet has also enabled outsourced legal research, accounting and reporting functions, medical transcription and analysis, payroll, writing computer codes, and creating CGI special effects and animation for American major studios.

Old world values of hard work with hope for advancement have been replaced by hard work solely to increase efficiency with a whole lot fewer opportunities to move up in a downsized corporate world… particularly if you are a “subcontractor” with very limited benefits…  not even an employee entitled to be promoted. Further, more women are enrolling in college these days than men. More competition for fewer jobs puts a downward pressure on wages.

CNN posits an even more devastating prediction: “The decline of men in the labor force has broad implications for families, taxpayers and the economy. Fewer employed men means more people on the dole and fewer taxpayers to contribute to the nation's economic growth…  Also, fewer of these men are in stable family relationships, contributing to growth of single-parent households. That fuels the widening income inequality gap and stunts the upward economic mobility of the next generation.” From struggling single parent households to two-couples-working-to-make-what-a-single-breadwinner-used-to-make families, expectations for a solid economic future seem to be vaporizing from our notion of an American dream.

What’s the answer? Create incentives for children to stay in school (make school relevant and interesting), pick up the tuition tab for those pursuing engineering, science, medicine and math, fund research to create technologies for the jobs of the future. The alternative? Well, just begin reading this blog from the top again.

I’m Peter Dekom, and we really do need the will to do what is obviously necessary to right this ship and steam forward!