Carefully Condensed Version of the Original Article
by Ye Editor
"For almost a decade now, one of the central questions in U.S. labor and social policy has been, “What happened to the men?”
Since 1960, the male labor force participation rate has plummeted twenty percentage points. Today, over ten percent of the prime-age male labor force does not work, one of the highest percentages of nonwork in all OECD countries.
... By 2017, between 7 and 10 million prime-age men, aged 24 to 54, were “not in labor force” (NILF). According to a Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) analysis, 40 percent of nonworking men are out of the workforce for health reasons, leaving somewhere between 3.5 million and 6 million at least theoretically available to work. Over 90 percent of these men do not have a college degree.
One of the soft spots in the disappearing-jobs storyline is the fact that job openings have been gradually rising across the economy since 2008, including in the manufacturing sector, and have accelerated significantly over the last year.
We now have 11 million open jobs, and, crucially, 1 million open manufacturing jobs, up from 200,000 before the pandemic.
This trend extends to other occupations that have traditionally attracted non-college-educated males. Construction openings are up and projected to go even higher, particularly in the commercial sector.
The jobs are there. The question is, “Are men are willing to take them?” The answer to this question appears to be “no.” Prior to the pandemic, just 14.8 percent of non-working, prime-age men expressed an interest in getting a job.
... Unlike out-of-workforce women who are overwhelmingly engaged in home-based work and care activities for children and other family, NILF men, on average, spend only about 43 minutes a day doing any kind of work or looking for work. Time studies of this population show they are heavily engaged in various forms of screen-based entertainment; about 1 in 4 report watching 21 hours of television or more each week.
... A recent study by the RAND Corporation found that the majority of unemployed men ages 30 to 38 have been arrested at least once, 40 percent have been convicted, and 20 percent have been incarcerated.
Work disengagement is associated with a wide variety of social ills including declining marriage rates, increasing death rates, single parenthood, and child poverty. One study found that a decline in manufacturing increased local opioid prescriptions.
Furthermore, families of nonworking men are deprived of economic support, often and especially in the cases of separated parents with child support debts. ...
... Harvard sociologist William Julius Wilson argued strenuously in the 1990s that it was wrong to blame unemployment among Black men on a “culture” of non-work when it was, in his view, mainly the result of a shift in available employment.
Jobs were moving out of the cities to suburban areas distant from where many Blacks lived. Black men weren’t fleeing jobs, he said; jobs were fleeing from Black men.
... Conservatives tended to reject structural explanations and instead focused on shifting attitudes toward work. There was no longer a clear social expectation that all able-bodied men should work, nor did people value the self-respect work engenders in the same way. AEI scholar emeritus Charles Murray claimed nonwork had to do with a decline in “industriousness.”
During the Clinton Administration and under a Republican Congress ... 1996 welfare reform bill ended the lifetime entitlement to welfare and substituted a five-year time limits on public benefits. Aid recipients were expected to be looking for work or training with the goal of transitioning to full-time employment, albeit with ongoing public subsidies in the form of income tax credits and childcare vouchers.
Under the new Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program, welfare caseloads and child poverty rates fell and incomes rose as former welfare recipients, mainly women with young children and disproportionately minority, entered the workforce.
Now, fast-forward to 2015. Progressives ... continuing to argue that work requirements for public benefits are akin to “blaming the victim” when “systemic” factors are really to blame for non work. ... When employment is not achieved, public benefits should replace wages, perhaps up to and including a universal basic income. Progressives may be wrong, but at least they are consistent.
The same cannot be said for conservatives. As work participation among white, non-college-educated men fell ... Populist conservatives decried trade deals for causing de-industrialization (the best scholarship places most of the blame on automation rather than trade) and called explicitly for greater government economic intervention to increase the availability of middle-skill manufacturing and other labor-intensive jobs.
... in the populist understanding of NILF males, it’s systems, structures, and policies that have failed rather than the men themselves, making these voices sound remarkably like the progressive left rather than traditional, culture-focused conservatives.
... The geographic shift of middle-skill jobs, domestically and abroad, creates barriers to employment. Laid-off workers can retrain or relocate, but both alternatives are complicated and expensive, in financial and personal terms.
In many cases, workers are attached to their communities and do not want to leave. In others, they are bound to stay as caregivers for other family members. Retraining takes time, is costly, and becomes more challenging as we age.
... The time limits and work requirements of the 1990s welfare reform fell squarely on women because cash benefits and other supports are intended to ensure that families don’t fall into destitution. These programs particularly impact custodial parents, who are overwhelmingly women.
Many of the men we would like to see working again—especially those with kids that taxpayers are supporting through public programs—are indirectly benefiting from federal programs by living with family or friends who receive government payments.
For everyone’s good, we must try harder to prevent able-bodied men, or men with disabilities that can be made fit for work, from becoming permanently dependent on cash assistance.
... the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Between 3 and 5 million male single-person households (not elderly or disabled) receive SNAP benefits. Unlike TANF, SNAP has no time limit or work requirements, a stance which should be reconsidered especially for non-custodial parents, to signal to men that public subsidies are intended as short-term support rather than a long-term lifestyle.
While previous efforts to impose
a work requirement have failed
the concept needs to be revisited.
The second program is Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) which has, for many, effectively become an open-ended welfare entitlement for NILF men. SSDI provides income support to 80 million men and its caseloads have grown dramatically over the past 5 decades. It is likely that some portion of the men currently on SSDI could, with adequate support, training, and accommodation, return to the labor force. What’s needed are changes to the way the program is administered that will help divert marginally disabled cases away from it.
... we must try harder to prevent able-bodied men, or men with disabilities that can be made fit for work, from becoming permanently dependent on cash assistance. More rigorous periodic reviews of disability status to recertify program eligibility might identify others whose conditions are sufficiently improved to allow work participation.
Given the high prevalence of opioid and alcohol abuse disorders among NILF men, we need to revisit the connection between substance abuse treatment and work requirements. For men whom courts remand for mandatory substance abuse treatment, work requirements, scaled to fit the treatment framework, should be incorporated into recovery plans.
... for justice-involved populations, boosting employment should start with intensive, evidence-based cognitive behavioral therapy programs during incarceration to help them prepare for life after prison, including employment. ...
America has a manual labor shortage crisis and, simultaneously, a crisis of male disengagement from work, making this an ideal time to renew the push to get NILF men back into the workforce.
... Nearly 30 years ago, federal welfare policy written chiefly by conservatives told women on public benefits that their dependency was harmful to them and to their families. Conservatives insisted, as a matter of social norms and policy, that they return to work.
We need to take a hard look at existing policy incentives, which demand paid employment of women who receive public benefits, while largely exempting NILF men, whether they receive public benefits or not.
If we permit this inequitable treatment to continue, conservatives must be pressed to explain why the sauce with which American society has doused the geese is somehow unsuitable for ganders."
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