The Slow Disappearance of the American Working Man

Submitted by Matt on Sun, 2011-08-28 16:27

Article here. Excerpt:

'As President Barack Obama puts together a new jobs plan to be revealed shortly after Labor Day, he is up against a powerful force, long in the making, that has gone virtually unnoticed in the debate over how to put people back to work: Employers are increasingly giving up on the American man.

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."'

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Comments

MRAs should not waste their time fighting for scraps left on the table (corporate America and big fat Federal government). Forget about what's left over from the meal that is already done... leave that to the feminists and manginas. MRAs should be looking forward to the new economy, and how things are going to work in the very near future. Read Richard Heinberg's book "The End Of Growth." It's all right there. GDP is not going back up. The stock market is not going back up. The government is going bankrupt and the money is soon to become worthless. We are not going to see a new infusion of traditional jobs that men can take.

Men need to create their own jobs, preferably working for themselves, where they don't have to answer to some feminist human resources department and the anti-male policies like sexual harassment that go along with that scene. It's time for men to get creative, which of course men are very good at. Skills that will be in demand in the future: (1) a willingness to do things that others don't want to do (like farming), (2) a willingness to get trained in areas that don't have high status (like farming), and (3) a willingness to work physically for long hours, performing hard labor (like farming).

The sham office jobs now found in America, where women sit around and gossip and do virtually nothing, those are going away too. Women are soon going to start appreciating men again, as the key to their survival. Too bad for women that a lot of American men are already so angry at the way they've been treated by feminist women, that these men are just going to let women fend for themselves. This about-face in the attitude of women should be amusing.

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Submitted by redwoodwriter on Mon, 2011-08-29 00:17