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"Meet the Unemployable Man"
Submitted by Matt on Fri, 2010-05-07 02:40
Article here. Excerpt:
'The betting is that the Labor Department's Friday snapshot of the job market will show that employers added workers in April, perhaps even that the unemployment rate fell.
That would be good news, but not good enough. It's hard to exaggerate how bad the job market is. Here's one arresting fact: One of every five men 25 to 54 isn't working.
Even more alarming, the jobs that many of these men, or those like them, once had in construction, factories and offices aren't coming back. "A good guess...is that when the economy recovers five years from now, one in six men who are 25 to 54 will not be working," Lawrence Summers, the president's economic adviser, said the other day.
...
For 50 years, the fraction of men with jobs in what once were prime earning years has been trending down. Over the same decades, the share of women who work has been rising, a significant social change that lately has cushioned the blow of Dad's unemployment for many couples.
Women have suffered less in this recession. They were more likely to be in health care and other jobs that weren't hit as hard as construction and manufacturing. They are increasingly likely to have the education so often required to get or keep a good job these days.
...
Each approach has shortcomings. So does doing nothing. Sidelining a huge part of an entire generation of men would waste human potential, create economic misery for their families and fuel political discontent.'
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Jobless rate rises to 9.9 pct.
That's just the official stat. In truth it's a lot higher:
'All told, 15.3 million people were out of work in April.
Counting people who have given up looking for work and part-timers who would prefer to be working full time, the so-called underemployment rate rose to 17.1 in April. That's close to the record high of 17.4 percent in October and shows just how difficult it is for jobseekers to find work.
Another grim statistic: The number of people out of work six months or longer reached 6.7 million in April, a new high. These people made up 45.9 percent of all unemployed people, also a record high.'
I have a feeling a lot of "discouraged workers" are men.
manonthestreet The
manonthestreet
The difficulty I have here is that none of these things matter provided that the politics is OK. You could have the whole of society in desperate straights but so long as it did not threaten the political status quo then it would be unnoticed. Suppose for example Germany had won WW2, do you then think that anyone would have even noticed the holocaust? I doubt it. To be honest provided these things are reasonably kept out of sight (and they will be) no one will care.
For example 40 million Americans are on food stamps. If 40 million Americans where in labour camps and prisons do you think it would bother anybody who was not directly concerned?
Agreed
Look at Greece. After decades of corruption and cronyism, now it is on the verge of revolution. Finally now, the elites are paying attention. But for how long? As long as they feel truly afraid of what the angry mob may do to them. Pretty much the same history played out century after century.
I predict the same thing here, but perhaps with a different scenario in the future, one that has much more of a genderal imbalance in its nature. Crowds of job-/homeless, angry, and soon-to-become violent men demanding answers and occupations making life unbearable for everyone else will be the last scene before anything will be done about it. As for now, 20% of working-age men unemployed and many seen as unemployable (and I don't believe that myself)? Ho-hum. It'll take 70% in that condition and rioting-mad to get things to change. Of course by then, it's too late. The society this happens in cannot by definition survive, since the resulting revolution (political and social) will usher in an entirely new one, given that the old one was unwilling or incapable of including or valuing the lives of men in it.
Men have this way of eventually deciding they have had quite enough abuse and taking whatever action seems necessary to end it. It's just a matter of when. I imagine there are powers-that-be that watch the men's right movement and wonder where it may pose a threat to the status quo in terms of politics, etc. It's not the men's rights movement they need to be too concerned with. It's the socio-economic status of the typical man (who is uninvolved with men's rights much less aware of them), multiplied by millions of men like him, they need to be concerned with. It's these men that don't talk, plead, or make their case on web sites or in letters to editors. It's the ones that get annoyed enough to make headline pictures as they throw rocks and bottles of gasoline at police, meters away from gov't buildings. Yet others among them may decide it's time for more serious action. It's those men they need to be concerned with just plain wiping the slate clean and starting over. And there'll be a lot more of them than there are of us (ie, MRAs) if things keep going the way they are. By then, if the powers-that-be let it get that far, it'll be too late for them, and as they say, a new day dawns.
Then the whole thing starts all over.
manonthestreet If there is
manonthestreet
If there is resistance in the USA like we see in Greece then one thing I am sure of. The response of the police and military will be far more violent and bloody than anything we see in Europe. I would expect a blood bath with not just sticks and shield being used but helicopters firing on crowds and machine guns used turned against al those who do not obey and submit.
The restraint is remarkable, but also the wisest thing for them
Yes, at first I was expecting to see a lot more violence from the Greek authorities, but so far they have been most restrained. I think they see the size of the forces against them and don't want to antagonize the masses any further. This less-confrontational approach in handling the protesters is in fact the wiser of the two kinds-- in this round, anyway. With the Greek government being so close to getting toppled, it shouldn't do anything to send the crowds over the edge.