What Happens When Men Don’t Work

29 thoughts on “What Happens When Men Don’t Work”

1. I’m not sure what we’d train them *for*. How many decent jobs actually go unfilled for the lack of a trained workforce?

   Unless there is some way we can get manufacturing back on a large scale, the only answer is to find a way to make the jobs available decent and attractive. I’d like to see national labor laws that take the place of unions, requiring employers to (for example) give people reasonably regular schedules, pay them a living wage, and offer at least 30 hours of work for anyone who wants full-time work and benefits.

   It would also help if our workforce wasn’t as large. But immigration isn’t going to slow down anytime soon and the number of decent jobs is contracting via off-shoring and automation, so this problem is only going to get worse.

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   1. I’d like to see national labor laws that take the place of unions, requiring employers to (for example) give people reasonably regular schedules, pay them a living wage, and offer at least 30 hours of work for anyone who wants full-time work and benefits.

      If there are no unions, there will be no means of enforcing such labor laws. And that’s setting aside the fact that the only reason we have labor laws to begin with are because of unions. Employers in nonunion settings violate labor laws with impunity because they can. No one is watching, and the Department of Labor (and the EEOC) doesn’t have the staff or resources to investigate all the claims coming in. Workers don’t have the money to hire their own attorneys. The political and economic strength of organized labor is and has been the only effective counter to the political and economic strength of capital.

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      1. How do you think Scandinavian countries, for example, police employers? There’s nothing unions can do, theoretically, that can’t be done on a national level.

         While neither is likely, the Department of Labor is far more likely to be fully funded and given teeth in the future than unions are to regain their former influence.

         Unions have done many great things, but they are dead in the water.

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      2. While neither is likely, the Department of Labor is far more likely to be fully funded and given teeth in the future than unions are to regain their former influence.

         I wouldn’t bet on that. The history of organized labor in this nation is one of regularly-scheduled “comebacks” after predictions of being a failed experiment, all washed up, etc. Look at all the rolling sit-downs in Mal-Farts, the demonstrations at fast-food joints.

         Don’t get me wrong: I have a strong critique of “business unionism”. I could regale you for hours at the barstool of your choice with labor history, and specifically the role of women, immigrants and labor-owned/produced media in making the successes of the past possible. The abandonment of old-school labor organizing after WWII set the stage for the failures of today. That can be reversed.

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2. I encounter these types of guys now and then – right before they join the ranks of the unemployed. I work for an IT consultancy, and we are frequently called upon to help companies that are in trouble, and are trying to turn it around via technology. Often the company’s real problem is not its systems, but its people. They have longstanding patterns for how they do their work, and they refuse to change. This is not about access to training, they have often been offered training again and again. It is, however, about stubbornness.

   IMO this stubbornness, or unwillingness to adapt to changes around you, masks a fear of loss of standing. If you are the senior accountant in a hospital, and systems changes could transform you from the manager of a staff of 6 to essentially a spreadsheet-crazy analyst, you may already see the writing on the wall. You probably also have trouble envisioning where you might land if you lose your current gig, especially if you can’t weather a drop in income. And so you deride the systems changes, insist the old way is the only way, sometimes even undermine the project. At times this approach works, although a company that can’t get its employees to evolve sometimes just goes under completely. Often, though, it results in months of conflict, ultimately concluding with the person being laid off.

   I also am unclear about how to solve the problem. But whatever it is, allowing these people to save face is a huge part of it.

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3. But you have to have some empathy for these people. They are being told that they have to accept a drop in salary, in responsibility, in prestige. They will have to do a less interesting job. They will have to work at something that makes them feel insecure. No wonder they fight it.

   I think those numbers are looking at different people that the senior accountant at a hospital. The senior accountant probably has a college degree. That group has problems, too. But that 16 percent unemployment rate is for non-college educated guys.

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4. It’s not about empathy, necessarily, as much as it’s about understanding why people aren’t making the change. Yes, it’s unusual for sweeping changes in the economy to wash so many jobs out of the system all at once. But often the folks who have opted for stubbornness over change work side-by-side with folks of the same demographics who *can* and *are* making the change. And BTW although I used an accountant as my example I’ve seen this behavior with all levels of people – from auto mechanics and security guards all the way up thru CEOs. I have two brothers-in-law who’ve experienced it as well. One weathered the change and actually prospered eventually, the other one was unemployed for many years and is now on disability. What’s the difference? Why can some handle it and others not?

   This study of human nature and how people handle change is a pet interest of mine. I am heavily informed by “The Worst Hard Time” – a book about the dust bowl and its impact on Oklahoma farmers.

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   1. Why can some handle it and others not?

      Sometimes it has to do with natural skillsets; some folks have a broad range of talents to develop, so if one doesn’t pan out, they can switch up. Other people really only have one or two strengths, and if those don’t pan out, they have less ability to make a change—employers aren’t looking for people with weak skills, even for low-paid jobs.

      Sometimes if has to do with resources. Getting more education is a cost in money and time. It also requires restructuring of previously-existing non-negotiable commitments, which requires the cooperation of others—which isn’t often forthcoming. The more balls a juggler has to keep in the air, and the longer period of time for juggling, the more likely balls are to drop—usually one of the more consequential balls, too. And when that happens, the problems are compounded (unlike the analogy, it’s not just a matter of “picking up the pieces”).

      Sometimes it has to do with toxic narratives that folks have embedded—the background noise that tells them what they can or cannot do. We all come from somewhere, and sometimes those “somewheres” have sabotage attached along with the resources. It’s tricky.

      Sometimes it has to do with how much trauma a person has already experienced. “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” is a nice feel-good platitude for someone who’s back on solid ground after struggle, but sometimes what-doesn’t-kill-you just eats up all one’s resources (outer or inner) and resolve. Exhaustion is real.

      Speaking of inner resources, some people just are naturally more resilient. I count myself among that number—I’ve been through so much soul-shattering shit, I can’t take credit for still being functional. I’ve got a naturally high resilience the same way I have a naturally hard head that (so far) has been resistant to knockouts. It is what it is.

      And quite frankly, some of it is age discrimination. People over the age of 40, and especially over the age of 50, are at a tremendous disadvantage. I’d like to hear more acknowledgement of just how throwaway older workers are.

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5. I also wonder about age. That 25-54 range is really broad.

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6. Yeah, I also think it’s interesting that some people are able to adapt, while others can’t. It’s a different population, but I know a lot of unemployed PhDs – both male and female. Some guys end up as SAHPs and act as support to their employed spouses. Others went into administration. Steve is only guy I know that went into an entirely different industry. I think the guys have a harder time with not finding tenure jobs than women. They seem more bitter. Their identity is so caught up in their jobs.

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7. The article left me with a lot of feelings. For one, it hurt my heart. Frank Walsh is one of mine. I know lots (I almost typed “losts”) of brothers in his situation. Some of them killed themselves. I’m home today with my flu-ridden daughter; if I’m not here to wake her up, she won’t push fluids. I was afraid if I left her at home by herself, she’d be seriously dehydrated when I got home. But I’m not losing my job today, unlike Brother Walsh who asked for a day to be with with his dying mother (yet one more reason labor unions are important. anyone who thinks there is any “solution” to any of this that doesn’t involve labor unions needs a 10-ton puller to yank their head from their posterior).

   Other thoughts: “men’s jobs” are code word for high pay, good benefits, and workplace dignity. Most of our economic growth has been in “women’s jobs”—code for poor pay, no benefits, micromanaged days, and disrespect. Men are at a disadvantage when they apply for “women’s jobs”—-because employers think there must be something Seriously Wrong with a man who would want one. It’s a red flag. Whereas a woman—well, she’s just a dumb broad. Of course she wants the job; she’s too stupid to do anything else. I’ve got a problem with the sexist assumptions, but I also have a problem with the judging from the cheap seats—the snooty, “well, he could be working at Mal-Fart” response. It’s not just about the money; it’s about the treatment. One doesn’t get extra pay for being the human-shaped dog to kick, and that piss-poor treatment really is harder to take as an adult.

   Another thing that occurs to me is how women get just as angry as men in those positions, but no one is writing stories about us because to a certain extent, that’s supposed to be our lot in life—jobs that are considered too demeaning, low-paid or undignified for a man are supposed to be perfectly fine for a woman. We do tend to be socialized from an early age to have more functional coping mechanisms, but that’s only because we’re supposed to be using them more often—male egos are to be coddled while women aren’t supposed to have any ego and shame on us if we do (see also: “long suffering Italian mothers”).

   The American Enterprise Institute can miss me with all their bullshit. Every time one of these stories pops up, there’s always some self-styled traditionalist along moaning about the lack of marriage. Lemme translate that for ya in realtime: if only more women would step up and be available as the whipping girl/emotional labor EMT, at least these men could be thrown on the garbage heap without recognizing it, because they’d have someone else below them to take the heat. Nope. Been there, done that, miss me with that shit too.

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   1. My cousin’s husband is a union electrician, and has had a terrible time getting work at home (near Seattle, work has dried up) but has been able to get jobs not wanted by union guys at the local for Silicon Valley and has worked on a number of the big projects down there. I think he is a loyal union guy, and that it has been good for him.

      I think a lot of rich people like to have powerless people work for them, folks who have to defer. This makes me very skeptical of the motives of plutocrats like Pelosi and Feinstein and the Wall Street Journal editorial page writers who claim humanitarian intent in letting in the world: illegals will work harder than and not push back on abuse as much as native borns. When there are twelve million illegals in the country, rich people can snap their fingers and get help, and it’s the less powerful citizens who cannot control their terms of work. Unions can mediate some, but they can be busted, or business can run away from them. I am in Virginia, an RTW state, and our trades take business away from union-friendly Maryland and DC all the time. The UAW was able to extract a lot of the profit from the Big Three when the Big Three was all there was, but when factories set up in Tennessee and there was no union, the lower price cars made there took a lot of marked, and GM went under. And we are all getting leveled with factory wages in Ulsan and Yokohama and Shenzhen.

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      1. As long as undocumented workers remain in the country, we mitigate, not exacerbate their effect on the labor force by allowing them to work legally.

         I agree that it’s clear that the wealthy (and owners of capital) like to have a powerless, at will labor force that is immediately available whenever they need it. I further agree that shadow workers contribute to that availability. But, so does the lack of labor laws, which allows owners to shift risk of labor needs directly to individuals.

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   2. That’s why we need labor laws and unions. The unions can’t find enough power without laws to back them up, on things like minimum wage, hours, conditions. I’m constantly horrified by the conditions that labor at Walmart, Amazon, . . . . have to work under. The recent Supreme Court case on being paid while waiting to go through security is an example. I haven’t followed the law or the legal decision making, but I can get the morality. If the law does not require the workers to be paid while they are being detained for the benefit of their employer (i.e. to systematically examine every worker for theft, because they are providing no other incentives — say a trustworthy relationship between employer and employee), it should.

      And, we have to concentrate on extending the reach of the law to those occupations that can’t be exported to other countries (or other states), like health care workers, teachers, childcare, restaurant, retail, . . . .

      Is any of this going to happen? Not for a while. Will it happen before we reach conditions that make the country unstable? I hope so.

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8. This, so much this. I can’t count the number of times I have told a potential client on an intake call (I am a legal secretary), “If you don’t have a union or a contract with your employer we can’t help you.”

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9. I think your statement: “As long as undocumented workers remain in the country, we mitigate, not exacerbate their effect on the labor force by allowing them to work legally. ” is sort of true but trivial. Yes, but if we allow them to work legally they are followed by millions more, and the effect of the new millions overwhelms the effect of those here being able to bargain better. There is great misery in Central America, and if folks can work here they will come. Here is the voice of an actual unemployed middle aged guy: http://thevailspot.blogspot.com/2014/12/help-requested.html with his view of who is responsible for his misery. This feeds into, I think, the Dems’ miserable record with working white people in the last election. I think our obligation to our own citizens is a stronger claim than our obligation to non-citizens.

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   1. Scapegoating. Sorry, but as an actual middle-aged fellow skilled tradesperson, undocumented immigrants are not taking the jobs of skilled (or even most semi-skilled) labor. It’s just a lot more convenient to demonize people who are in the exact same position as yourself—people who are scrambling to make a living for themselves and their families, because they’ve been dispossessed by the same economic policies that have upended your means of making a living, than it is to put the blame on those setting the policies. They have power—they’re hard to fight. Some schmuck that has just as much nothing as you is a lot easier to fight. And that’s all it is—the politics of anger. “I want someone else to hit that can’t hit me back.”

      Like I said before, the Democrats actually have a good record with unionized white people. They also have a good record with single white women (who outnumber married white women). They could win a lot more elections if they looked back on their own history and emphasized economics—-call it a 21st Century New Deal. If they had the political courage to call out the new feudalism by name, they could get somewhere. Supply-side economics and austerity are an abject failure, and there are so many tangible examples to point to. Would they get the vote of the guy at that link? Nope. But he isn’t representative of the entire white working class—he’s just who the media point to because he provides a deep contrast that already fits an old narrative (“resentful white guy, angry at blacks, Latinos and women), the kind of guy writers like Edsell can hash out an easy story about.

      The AFL-CIO used to do a survey every couple of years called “Ask a Working Woman”. They haven’t done one in awhile, probably because they kept getting the same answers. We have yet to find any media mavens with the political courage to center “working class” with a diverse group of WORKING WOMEN for a change. Naahhh, just the same tired angry white guy bullshit—some dude who’s angry about immigrants the same way his grandparents were angry about OUR grandparents coming here (I’m going out on a limb and assuming most of the readers of this blog are Ellis Island grandchildren. I could be wrong about that, but suspect I’m not the only one).

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10. What is most disheartening is that I am not hearing any solutions.

    Of course you aren’t hearing any solutions. But that’s not because they don’t exist, but because the chattering class (I’ll call it the “The New Republic implosion was the worst thing ever” crowd) doesn’t like the answers. The solutions involve rolling back the financialization of our economy and the mitigation of globalization. Several things that could help:

    1. The reversal of the privileged treatment of capital income over labor income in our tax system.
    2. A regulatory system that returns banks to institutions that borrow at 4% and lend at 5% rather than corporate raiders that buy out companies, loot them of all their assets, and leave the shattered husk to rot. (For instance, see Timken for the latest example of this.)
    3. A move towards autarky. Full autarky isn’t possible, but we are on the wrong end of the spectrum. See, for instance, Australia, which has a much more protectionist economy and a much more equitable division of income. Free trade is for the “I’m sad about the New Republic” crowd and the banksters, not the common man.
    4. A reform of our education system (as you said) to include universal pre-school and universal access to higher education. If it is documented that access/non-access to pre-school produces disparate outcomes and it is an accepted conclusion that some post-secondary education is needed to succeed in our society then why are these things a province of the affluent?

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    1. Of course you aren’t hearing any solutions. But that’s not because they don’t exist, but because the chattering class (I’ll call it the “The New Republic implosion was the worst thing ever” crowd) doesn’t like the answers.

       ^^^^^^THIS.

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11. Oh yeah, I forgot the most important thing we could do to help working class America:

    5. A full repeal of Taft-Hartley.

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12. Jay, a phrase I like for “the “The New Republic implosion was the worst thing ever” crowd” is the “New Clerisy”. “Limousine Liberals” is good, too, and has some mileage on it. I was raised for the New Clerisy, myself, but fell off the wagon after I took economics and started thinking hard about incentives. A disappointment to my family, I am, in some ways.

    On your Point 4 – the stuff I have seen about Head Start suggests fairly transitory gains, mostly gone by the end of elementary school. My kids have just gone through elementary schools which were pretty fully in line with New Clerisy prescriptions, and I think they came out with less skills than I got from the ‘drill and memory’ elementary school I went to. So I would start by taking the schools back to about 1965.

    I had a sort of unusual college career, went to a third-tier state college (let’s call it ‘Flotsam and Jetsam State U), a junior college, and then my state’s flagship university. It didn’t leave me confident that my fellow students at F&J were going to come out as broadly educated and confident citizens, or better able to scale the heights of the job world. So I’m inclined to say yes to postsecondary, but that that should include HVAC training and machinist training and lots of certificates and apprenticeships.

    Remember when Suze Orman useta go preening around the stage saying ‘college debt is good debt’? Kids going to F&J are foregoing wages, paying tuition, and going deep in debt to come out and work at Home Depot for the guy who left high school when they did and went directly into work. It’s not good for them, but it does support the New Clerisy members of the F&J faculty.

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    1. Suze Orman has a lot to answer for.

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    2. Vocational schools actually have a worse track record for finding employment for their graduates than traditional colleges. And the certificates aren’t as portable (or as recognized). Speaking as someone who went through a traditional apprenticeship, I think votech schools are a ripoff. My education was free. I was earning while I was learning. I had healthcare benefits and was already building my pension while I was learning. And the training itself is far, far more comprehensive than what people are paying a premium for in votech programs (well, at least for the trades).

       So no, Suze Orman doesn’t have anything to answer for. I’ll believe that college is a poor deal when the upper middle class stops sending their own children there, and no sooner. The objective record still shows that not having college under one’s belt is a big disadvantage. Debt sucks. But if you don’t take on the debt to go to school, you’re going to be in debt anyway—your wages-to-expenses ratio is going to be upside down, and you’ll be dealing with more (and longer-term) unemployment. Might as well go with the better odds and get a degree.

       “The New Clerisy”hasn’t taken off as a catchphrase because no one knows what it means…..something vaguely churchy. “Elitists” does a better job. Working class people don’t denigrate education; we want our kids to go to school just like you do. We just dislike being stereotyped as dummies. The front-and-center top of the page for google results on “clerisy” includes “reading for pleasure”. Didn’t Oprah resusitate the publishing industry by proving it’s not just college graduates that read? (oh look,yet another example of how working class women are made invisible by standard media narratives).

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13. “..Like I said before, the Democrats actually have a good record with unionized white people…”

    It’s been interesting to watch what has been going on in Wisconsin – and I haven’t been there in years! But what I read is that Walker (who has now won four elections in a row) is doing extremely well with unionized private sector workers, who have a lot of resentment towards public sector union workers. In many ways it is the same story as one sees in Michigan and Illinois, manufacturing jobs going in the toilet and public sector pension plans paying benefits not sustainable from the payments of the public sector workers. I’m kind of interested in your view here why – and I haven’t read about the sort of resentment towards public sector union workers in Illinois as I have read of in WI, and you don’t display any – things would be different in Wisconsin.

    From talking with my cousin’s husband (this is sort of a hole in the English language – shouldn’t there be a name for that relationship? ‘Cousin-in-law’ doesn’t cut it. We are also missing a word for the relationship between the two sets of parents of a married couple…) I haven’t heard of resentment towards public sector unions from private sector union people in Washington, either. But Walker has certainly done well from it.

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14. Walker (who has now won four elections in a row) is doing extremely well with unionized private sector workers, who have a lot of resentment towards public sector union workers.

    I don’t think that’s true. Two-thirds of union members went with Burke. Walker actually lost 3% of the union members who voted for him the last time around. Any analysis of Walker is incomplete without mention of the Koch machine, but it’s also incomplete without mention of the terrible ground game played by the Democratic party. A refocus by the Dems on income inequality and the destruction of the social contract would be an effective counter to the wedge strategy on social issues played by their opponents.

    You are right—there is no resentment towards the pensions of Illinois public sector workers. For one, AFSCME has done a bang-up job of making the public aware that public sector workers have completely lived up to their end of the bargain—their individual contributions went into the pension fund. It’s the elected officials who pissed all the state’s portion of those contributions away instead of putting them in the pension. For another, Illinois pensions are lower than most other states, despite our high cost of living (higher utilities, gas, groceries, etc.). The average Illinois pensioner is taking home less than $30,000. That makes for pretty austere living here.

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15. Blaming public employees for pension issues is the same old distraction from the real problem: the market. Most pension funds are underfunded because the money is invested in the market and the market tanked, hard, right when baby boomers were starting to retire in large numbers. So public employers had to raise taxes or cut necessary program funding so they could contribute more to the pension funds…and still got low returns. If the market swings up hard and long enough, investment returns will allow contribution rates to go back down to historic norms. And enough changes were made (at least in Oregon) in the 1990s to ensure that current employees won’t get pension payouts high enough to repeat the mistake-they’ve mostly been moved into defined contribution plans and out of defined benefit plans.

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    1. Yes. They made a huge reform here for the transit drivers and the drivers had to swallow a huge pension cut (basically, lost all retirement medical benefits and upped the years required to retire). It was necessary to allow public transportation to continue, along with a small tax increase, after the state cut funding to the local authority. As near as I can tell from arguing on local politics blogs, nobody remembers the cut in the retirement benefits and everybody remembers the tax. This is one of the things that convinced me that most people seeking public sector reform were actually just trying to destroy the parts of the public sector that didn’t shovel money to old people.

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16. We live near Norfolk, VA and we’ve seen this happen. Lots of temporary jobs that pay well doing things like working as a diver to go underwater to do ship repairs, lots of welding jobs having to do with naval ship repairs — but they’re all contingent on there being a job repairing ships that year. The rest of the time there are a lot of dads picking kids up from school.

    One thing we’ve noticed is the importance of social capital in maintaining a decent standard of living for someone without a college education. We know guys in the police force, fire service, etc. who have made sure that their immediate relatives are able to walk into those types of jobs, but the people who really suffer in our area are the people that are ‘not from around here’ and who don’t have those connections.

    The solution in our area seems to be for municipalities to do lots of useless construction to create jobs. We now have a useless light rail system that goes nowhere, a bunch of new bridges and will soon have a useless new stadium. Not sure what’s going to happen when we run out of construction projects.

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    1. It’s not just people who “aren’t from around here” that suffer; it’s also women. Men are prioritized for the good jobs when economic times get tough. There’s a strong resentment of women who step into the good jobs (that don’t require a college education), because men supposedly “need” those jobs more. Women are supposed to (a) take the low-wage crap jobs, and/or (b) find a man to marry.

       It’s strange your area hasn’t been able to parlay improved infrastructure into regional investment. In Illinois, the areas with improved infrastructure have significantly better employment than those without. As in, a 10-20% difference in male unemployment according to the interactive map (mind you; I’m only comparing urban/former industrial counties, not rural. That’s a different world to me). The areas with things like better roads and light rail have been able to attract employers; the areas with the hollowed-out tax base that haven’t been able to make those improvements are just getting more hollowed out—the boulder keeps on rolling down.

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