Why have so many men stopped working?

CNN Money ^ | 09/11/2015

[SeekAndFind]

Fifty years ago, nearly every single working-age American man had a job or was looking for one. That's not the case anymore.

The labor force participation rate for men ages 25 to 54 stood at nearly 97% in 1965, but now hovers near a record low of 88%. That rate includes those who are working or have looked for a job in the past four weeks.

If the participation rate had held steady, more than five million additional men would be in the workforce. Men are dropping out of the labor force in large part because they can't find positions that pay decently or they don't have the education and skills to land employment, experts say.

Richard Kessler is one of them.

Kessler, who worked as a research analyst and database manager at financial information firms, hasn't held a job since he was laid off during the recession of the early 1990s. He was 37.

Unable to find a job, he became a stay-at-home dad to his son, Chris. Still, he looked for work and went through a retraining program, learning computer skills such as Word and Excel, in the mid-1990s. The positions he was offered, however, paid only $8 an hour.

"It didn't make sense to give that to a babysitter," said Kessler, now 60, who lives in Bernardsville, N.J., with his wife, a business analyst. Kessler decided to start looking again when Chris hit his teen years. But that coincided with the Great Recession, when jobs were again scarce. He hasn't sent out a resume in more than a year, saying he now lacks the technical skills and references needed to land employment.

"I don't know what's worse -- the stress of not having a job or the stress of having a job," he said.

[FreedomStar3028]

President doesn’t gotta work.

[Arm_Bears]

In my case, nobody seems terribly interested in hiring a 60-year old White, conservative, Christian.

[KC_Conspirator]

Because of the administrations economic policies. Thats the answer.

[backwoods-engineer]

They really don't know?

So many are on the dole, so they don't have to. And feminism has ensured that children aren't taken care of by their own mothers, causing double damage: the next generation of men are raised by single mothers, and women take the jobs the men used to have.

This country deserves every bit of wrath God brings down on it.

[Old Sarge]

Because it’s Bush’s Fault and you’re a racist, that’s why!

[Crucial]

The real question is what are the womwomen doing? Are they more savvy about the skills needed, more savvy about how to keep their jobs or is it the fact that they will take less for the same work?

[Old Sarge]

For it is written in The Book Of The Won, Chapter Won, Verse Won:

Thou shalt never cast doubt or question the wisdom of Thy Lord and Savior, The Obama, The Messiah, The Won, lest thou be called racist and other diverse names besides.

Here endeth the lesson.

[theBuckwheat]

Short answer: because in too many jurisdictions, not working gets sufficient “benefits”.

It turns out, despite what leftists say about capitalism, that a lot of people don’t want to keep earning more and more. They just want to earn enough, and even government “in-kind benefits” are a form of income.

After all, according to several sources such as the Heritage Foundation, the average poor person in the US lives quit well.

The following are facts about persons defined as “poor” by the Census Bureau as taken from various government reports:

80 percent of poor households have air conditioning. In 1970, only 36 percent of the entire U.S. population enjoyed air conditioning.

92 percent of poor households have a microwave.
Nearly three-fourths have a car or truck, and 31 percent have two or more cars or trucks.

Nearly two-thirds have cable or satellite TV.

Two-thirds have at least one DVD player, and 70 percent have a VCR.

Half have a personal computer, and one in seven have two or more computers.

More than half of poor families with children have a video game system, such as an Xbox or PlayStation.

43 percent have Internet access.

One-third have a wide-screen plasma or LCD TV.

One-fourth have a digital video recorder system, such as a TiVo.

see:

Understanding Poverty in the United States: Surprising Facts About America’s Poor

http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2011/09/understanding-poverty-in-the-united-states-surprising-facts-about-americas-poor

And just a few months ago:

Obama Pledges to Bring Broadband Internet to Poor Households

http://www.nbcnews.com/tech/internet/obama-pledges-bring-broadband-poor-communities-n392836

Place to live, food to eat, medical care, air conditioning in the summer, heat in the winter and high speed internet. Why work at all? Yes indeed. Why work at all?

[Alberta's Child]

If that guy lives in Bernardsville he's probably among the "Five Percent" in this country -- if not the "One Percent."

I suspect he and his wife have other sources of income aside from their employment.

[skeeter]

For two years I tried going back to what I was doing. I acquired new skills and tried other professions. I can vouch for your comment, generally - no one wants a middle aged white guy, regardless of experience.

twenty years ago I couldn't miss. Today, couldn't get an offer to save my life.

As it turned out, next to marriage and kids that rejection has turned out to be the best thing thats happened to me in my adult life.

[Iron Munro]

One reason - Because the federal government pays members of liberal victim groups for not working.

Another - Government rules and regulations have practically eliminated many entry level jobs or made them prohibitively expensive for employers.

[NorthMountain]

To hell with 0bama.

Yeah, I’m a bloody infidel ... I reject 0bammunism and the 0bammessiah.

To hell with 0bama.

[Noumenon]

A lot of people are now working as they say in Russia.

[buckalfa]

"So many are on the dole, so they don't have to."

Read recently welfare benefits equate to about a $30K a year income, or $14.42 an hour. Why work at a job that pays less than that, except for a short period to reset your benefit eligibility?

[tbw2]

This is the result of:
* discriminating against boys in school, seeing masculinity as toxic, so fewer finish high school and go on to college
* discriminating against young men in college admissions and doubling down on it by bias against them in scholarships, so that many who try drop out due to lack of funding
* last hired, first laid off, per federal diversity mandates at many government contractors, built into the contract and flowing down into HR policy
* some staying on the dole with SSDI received when the kid was classified as learning disabled and continues into adulthood
* many men working under the table, both as illegal immigrants and the incentives to make less to get more benefits

[Freedom of Speech Wins]

Some people see things wrongly.

There is masonic thinking out there.

Bumping for later analysis on the article here too.

[kabar]

Immigration. We have a surplus of labor.

Government data collected in December 2014 show 18 million immigrants (legal and illegal) living in the United States who arrived in January 2000 or later. But only 9.3 million jobs were added over this time period. In addition, the native-born population 16 and older grew by 25.2 million. Because job growth has not come close to matching immigration and population growth, the share of Americans in the labor force has declined dramatically — a clear indication there is no labor shortage. Despite this, Congress is considering proposals to increase legal immigration even further; and during the last Congress the Senate actually passed the Schumer-Rubio bill (S.744), which would have doubled legal immigration and legalized illegal immigrants.1 Congress's disregard for the absorption capacity of the U.S. labor market has profound consequences for American workers.

[Noumenon]

I meant to say na levo. Damn phone spell corrector.

[kabar]

We have a shortage of jobs, not labor.