Men Eroding in the Work Force

Male participation in the work force is not very high and wages are sliding.  This is the conclusion of a Business Week article, to be found here.

An extract:

If that sounds bleak, it's because 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 increasing number of women who went to work and took up the slack. More recently, the housing bubble helped to mask it by boosting the male-dominated construction trades, which employed millions. When real estate ultimately crashed, so did the prospects for many men.  The portion of men holding a job—any job, full- or part-time—fell to 63.5 percent in July—hovering stubbornly near the low point of 63.3 percent it reached in December 2009. These are the lowest numbers in statistics going back to 1948.  Among the critical category of prime working-age men between 25 and 54, only 81.2 percent held jobs, a barely noticeable improvement from its low point last year—and still well below the depths of the 1982-83 recession, when employment among prime-age men never dropped below 85 percent. To put those numbers in perspective, consider that in 1969, 95 percent of men in their prime working years had a job.

Men who do have jobs are getting paid less. After accounting for inflation, median wages for men between 30 and 50 dropped 27 percent—to $33,000 a year— from 1969 to 2009, according to an analysis by Michael Greenstone, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology economics professor 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," Greenstone says. "That has staggering implications."

Business Week tries to say that if more men went to college more men would have jobs, but a sampling of restaurant front end staff suggests otherwise.  And, we have come to see some low-skill jobs as being for illegal immigrants (undocumented workers for the politically correct).

We have a problem.

And MSNBC sees part of the college education solution in Pell Grants.  That is looking to the Federal Government for a solution.  Why not the individual states reducing tuition for their residents, to make a college education more affordable.  Back in the day, in Long Beach, CA, I could have gone to my local community college (junior college) for the cost of books, locker fees and a parking pass.  Not much more than High School.  And credits box topped to UCLA.  The State College (now University of California, Long Beach) would have been a little more, including a student activity fee.  And it would have been a shorter commute than Long Beach City College.

But, the key to a college education is life skills normally picked up while growing up in a loving and supportive family.  We are back to the culture issue.

Hat tip to the InstaPundit.

Regards  —  Cliff