As President Barack Obama puts together yet another “new” jobs plan, he is up against a powerful and dangerous trend: A smaller share of men have jobs today than at any time since World War II.**
If that sounds bleak, it is. The portion of men who work and their median wages have been eroding since the early 1970s. For decades the impact of this fact was softened in many families by the number of women going back to work. The housing bubble helped mask it by artificially stoking the male-dominated construction trades. But when real estate crashed, the portion of men holding a job—any job, full- or part-time—fell to 63.5 percent in July 2011— just a hair above the December 2009 low point of 63.3 percent.
These are the worst numbers since 1948. Among the critical category of prime working-age men between 25 and 54, only 81.2 percent held jobs. In the current recession, 80 percent of all jobs lost were held by men. In perspective, in 1969 95 percent of men in their prime working years had a job.
Men who do have jobs are getting paid less. Adjusted for inflation, median wages for men aged 30 to 50 dropped 27 percent—to $33K a year— from 1969 to 2009, according to an analysis by MIT economics professor Michael Greenstone, who was chief economist for Obama's Council of Economic Advisers. "That takes men and puts them back at their earnings capacity of the 1950s. That has staggering implications."
Moderately skilled men without a college education have taken direct hits to their employment prospects. But even those with bachelor's degrees from less selective schools are seeing their economic worth erode. The middle is crumbling, with elites doing better while more male citizens are being pushed down the compensation scale.
What is wrong?
For generations, American workers kept up with technological change by achieving higher levels of education than their parents. But college graduation rates for men stopped growing in the late 1970s, just as stagflation, mass immigration, and the collapse of domestic manufacturing spiked upwards.
After a long decline in men's work opportunities, the current recession worsened things with a sharp drop in male employment. The recession has exacerbated forces that were already undermining men in the workplace. Corporations have outsourced manufacturing jobs, routine computer programming, and even simple legal work overseas. Production jobs that remain demand higher skills, for which it is cheaper to hire indentured foreign guest-workers. Massive immigration, both legal and illegal, have increased competition for work and depressed wages in low and high-skill job sectors, from laborers to managers, across the board. Unemployed men are now more likely than women to be among the long-term jobless.
All this matters to every citizen, because social scientists are learning that unemployment appears to be more traumatic for men without jobs, who are more likely to commit crimes and go to prison. They are less likely to wed, more likely to divorce, and more likely to father a child out of wedlock. Ironically, unemployed men tend to do even less housework than men with jobs and often retreat from family life, says W. Bradford Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project. When male unemployment cross-breeds with family collapse, the resulting crisis becomes contagious nation-wide.
The long-term fix will be tough to achieve: getting more men to attend college while protecting the job opportunities for those who don't. The most obvious rapid response would be to return the 20 to 25 million jobs currently held by illegal aliens and foreign guest-workers back to the American labor market, and to force both federal and state governments and business interests to train the needed manpower by recruiting exclusively among American workers, especially for jobs requiring a high school diploma or less.
But grappling with these major problems won't be Obama's top priority. He is under pressure to pass out electoral favors for the core Democratic coalition—immigrants, perverts, Ivy Ligistas and those dependent on government payments of all kinds. His workfare attempts have been, unsurprisingly, failures, because they are in part based on defective affirmative action models that tragically promote hiring preferences and quotas for everyone BUT unemployed American male citizens. They haven’t worked anywhere else on the planet, either.
Funding labor-intensive projects, such as retrofitting buildings for energy conservation or refurbishing aging schools, would theoretically put men back to work—but Obama has instead initiated administrative amnesty plus work authorization for hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens, and fought programs like E-Verify that would protect our most vulnerable American workers in construction and other sectors.
And in any case, Obama’s abuse of stimulants has blown to hell the nation’s ability to publicly finance US job creation programs. His jobs and training programs shamelessly focus on the most recent “arrivals” to our shores, not native black or white American high school graduates. With Obama’s blessing, even the armed forces are demanding access to cheaper Foreign Legion-style manpower.
Worse than wrong, these policies are unsustainable.
** Radically adapted from Mike Dorning, Bloomberg Business Week, August 25, 2011
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