Pinched

by Don Peck

  Pockets of chronic joblessness, poverty, and social dysfunction have of course been a part of the nation’s geography for a long time. Every now and then, a book or television show will come along that brings some national focus to these areas—The Other America, The Wire—but because such places are so cut off from mainstream American life, they generally have been easy to ignore.

  The Great Recession has deepened the misery in many of these places. Year by year, it is also creating more of them. It’s a long way, both economically and culturally, from most blue-collar neighborhoods or less affluent suburbs to Kensington or Harlan County. But the distance is slowly growing shorter. The steady disappearance of nonprofessional middle-class jobs is creating the possibility that a larger underclass could form in the United States, one that becomes self-perpetuating and extends across generations. The elements that ultimately produce a true underclass are varied, and they interact in complicated ways. But the ingredients for such a soup are present today, and the recession has stirred them. One of the most important—the one that typically sets everything else in motion—is the failure and frustration of working-class men.

  THE WEIGHT OF this recession has fallen most heavily upon men, who suffered roughly three-quarters of the 8 million job losses in 2008 and 2009. Male-dominated industries (construction, manufacturing) have been particularly hard-hit, while sectors that disproportionately employ women (education, health care) have held up relatively well. In January 2011, 18.8 percent of all men in their prime working years, twenty-five to fifty-four, did not have jobs; since the recession began, fewer prime-age men have been employed than at any time since the Bureau of Labor Statistics began tracking the statistic in 1948. During the recession, for the first time in U.S. history, women came to hold a majority of the country’s jobs.

  In this respect, the recession has merely intensified a long-standing trend. Broadly speaking, the service sector, which employs more women, is growing, while manufacturing, which employs more men, is shrinking. The net result is that men have been contributing a smaller and smaller share of family income—and working less and less over time.

  One of the great puzzles of the past thirty years has been the way that men, as a group, have responded to a declining market for blue-collar jobs. Opportunities have expanded for college graduates over that span, and for nongraduates, jobs have proliferated within the service sector (at wages ranging from rock-bottom to middling). Yet in the main, men have availed themselves of neither of these opportunities. The proportion of young men with a bachelor’s degree today is about the same as it was in 1980. And as the sociologists Maria Charles and David Grusky noted in their 2004 book, Occupational Ghettos, while men and women now mix more easily on different rungs of the career ladder, many individual industries and occupations have remained astonishingly segregated, with men continuing to seek work in a dwindling number of manual jobs and women “crowding into nonmanual occupations that, on average, confer more pay and prestige.” Between 2000 and 2009, for instance, the ratio of women to men in education and health services remained unchanged at about three to one.

  As recently as 2001, U.S. manufacturing still employed about as many people as did health and educational services (roughly 16 million each). But since then, those latter, female-dominated sectors have added about 4 million jobs, while manufacturing has lost about the same number. And while men made no inroads into these growing sectors over that time, they did consolidate their hold on manufacturing jobs—those dwindling jobs, along with jobs in construction, transportation, and utilities, were more heavily dominated by men in 2009 than they’d been at the beginning of the decade.

  “Forty years ago, thirty years ago, if you were one of the fairly constant fraction of boys who wasn’t ready to learn in high school, there were ways for you to enter the mainstream economy,” says Henry Farber, an economist at Princeton. “When you woke up, there were jobs. There were good industrial jobs, so you could have a good industrial, blue-collar career. Now those jobs are gone.” And men have yet to adjust. In 1967, 97 percent of thirty- to fifty-year-old American men with only a high-school diploma were working; in 2010, just 76 percent were. Declining male employment is not unique to the United States. It’s been happening in almost all rich nations as they’ve put the industrial age behind them.

  In her 2010 Atlantic essay “The End of Men,” the journalist Hanna Rosin posed the question “What if the modern, postindustrial economy is simply more congenial to women than to men?” What if the exodus of men from the workforce that began in the malaise of the 1970s, and has continued at a more measured pace since then, is once again gaining speed—especially in the bottom half of the economy?

  “I’m deeply concerned” about the prospects of less-skilled men, says Bruce Weinberg, an economist at Ohio State. “Looking over the past forty years, deindustrialization has been bad for men.” Weinberg’s research has shown that in occupations in which “people skills” are becoming more important, employment is skewing more and more toward women. And that category of occupations is large indeed. In his National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, “People People,” Weinberg and his two coauthors found that interpersonal skills typically become more important and more highly valued in occupations in which computer use is prevalent and growing, and in which teamwork is important. They also become more important in “firms which have recently gone through organizational changes,” as so many have in this recession. Even for jobs in traditionally masculine fields like home improvement, people skills and customer service have arguably become more important than they used to be.

  In surveys, women are more likely than men to say they are effective at “people tasks.” They’re also more cooperative in Prisoner’s Dilemma games (in which teamwork is necessary to the achievement of the best result for both players). Needless to say, a great many men have excellent people skills, just as a great many men do well in school. And many of the differences we observe between the genders may be the result of culture rather than genetics. All that notwithstanding, a meaningful minority of men have struggled badly as the economy has evolved, and have shown few signs of successful adaptation.

  Many women are also struggling because of the recession. After the crash, in 2009, the unemployment rate among single mothers was 13.6 percent. And indeed, while employment among women with only a high-school degree rose sharply from the mid-1960s through 2000, it has declined somewhat since then (albeit less dramatically than it has for men). The disappearance of middle-skill jobs has hurt members of both sexes, and has increased the number of men and women who drift in and out of the labor force, weakly attached to low-wage, low-status, generally unpleasant jobs at the bottom of the economy.

  Nonetheless, the structural changes in the economy, accelerated by the recession, have been hardest on men. And male unemployment, historically, has been hardest on society. Three years after the crash, its social consequences are becoming visible once again.

  “I LIKE IT outside, you know?” said Frank Massoli (a pseudonym), a former construction foreman who lives outside Reading, Pennsylvania, in December 2010. “You see all these office buildings—you stick me in one of them, I’d be completely clueless.… I don’t like being penned up with the same people each day.”

  Massoli, a stocky, balding forty-seven-year-old with fat brown sideburns and a thick, hoop-shaped silver earring, has worked much of his life outside; at different times, he’s been a well-digger and a construction worker. Long ago, he worked in a factory, but he lost that job in his twenties. Before the recession, he was a foreman with a small construction outfit. “Things were pretty good,” he said. “I was working six days a week, we went to Outback Steakhouse once a month. We were doing pretty good.”

  In July 2008, he lost that job, and couldn’t find another one for more than two years. By 2010, his wife had left and they’d split custody of their eight adopted children. Four initially lived with him, although a fifteen-year-old daughter went to li
ve with her mother after she became pregnant and stole money from Massoli.

  Over those two years, Massoli went to some meetings for the unemployed sponsored by his church—“I was feeling pretty down,” he said, and he thought he could use some guidance and support. But he says he wasn’t qualified for the jobs that were posted by the group—most of them were in customer service or required more than a high-school degree—and he didn’t feel like he fit in. He stopped going after he had a run-in with a human-resources consultant the group had brought in. She told him that he would have a hard time getting hired outside of construction, given the way he was describing himself and one of his past employers, for whom he had little respect. “And I was like, ‘Kiss my ass.’ ” He’d never been the sort to sugarcoat things, he told me. He was a good worker, he said, and that’s what should count.

  Massoli said he’d looked for a job daily since he’d gotten laid off—in construction, delivery, machine operation, kitchen work. He was occasionally able to get some part-time work with his cousin, laying carpet. He knew there were government-sponsored retraining programs available, but he felt he was too old for that, and besides, he’d never been much of a classroom guy.

  As time went by, with his savings exhausted and bills going unpaid, he began rooting through neighbors’ garbage at night, looking for scrap he might be able to sell. “I’m a hustler,” he said. “And I had no health insurance. I was divorced.” He’d go out in his pickup with his kids at about six in the evening and cruise around until nine or nine thirty, looking through people’s trash. Then he’d get up at about three in the morning and cruise around again for three or four hours on his own. He quickly learned the trash-pickup schedule for neighborhoods as far as thirty miles from his house. “I only took what people left out,” he told me, although he wouldn’t talk about his scavenging until I agreed not to use his real name. “There was competition,” he said. “I remember one night driving around a corner, and I missed a washing machine, which is worth like twenty bucks, by like ten seconds, because someone got there before me.”

  His kids would help him tear apart the appliances they found, separating out the coated wire, brass fittings, and other components that could be resold. He would fix old lawn mowers he’d picked up, and resell them. Usually, he could make $75 or more a day, though fuel for his truck ate pretty heavily into that. He feared getting sick, because he had no health insurance—but also because he was living hand-to-mouth and couldn’t afford days off.

  To his great relief, in August 2010 Massoli found steady work again, digging geothermal wells with a company he used to work for long ago. “It’s hard,” he said, “and I’m not young.” It didn’t pay nearly what his job as a construction foreman did, but it had health benefits and was steady—though he didn’t know if it would remain that way. The company was not doing well, he said, but the checks were still clearing. He’d bought a good steak and cooked it up for his kids recently. “I got bills to pay,” he said. “But you got to do something once in a while.” I asked him what would happen if the company were to fail. “I’ll be back to scrappin’. What else am I gonna do?”

  NUCLEAR FAMILIES, WITH both parents present in the home, are of course less the norm today than they used to be. And “traditional” marriages, in which men engage in paid work and women in homemaking, have long been in eclipse. Particularly in blue-collar families, where many husbands and wives work staggered shifts, men routinely handle a lot of the child care. Still, the ease with which gender bends in modern marriages should not be overestimated. When men stop doing paid work—and even when they work less than their wives—marital conflict usually follows.

  Between 2007 and 2010, calls to the National Domestic Violence Hotline rose continually, by almost 20 percent in total; as was the case during the Depression, unemployed men are vastly more likely to beat their wives or children. More common than violence, though, is a sort of passive-aggressiveness. In Identity Economics, the economists George Akerloff and Rachel Kranton find that among married couples, men who aren’t working at all, despite their free time, do only 37 percent of the housework, on average. And some men, apparently in an effort to guard their masculinity, actually do less housework after becoming unemployed.

  Many working women struggle with the idea of partners who aren’t breadwinners. “We’ve got this image of Archie Bunker sitting at home, grumbling and acting out,” says Kathryn Edin, a professor of public policy at Harvard, and an expert on family life. “And that does happen. But you also have women in whole communities thinking, This guy’s nothing.” Edin’s research in low-income communities shows, for instance, that most working women whose partner stayed home to watch the kids—while very happy with the quality of child care their children’s father provided—were dissatisfied with their relationship overall. “These relationships were often filled with conflict,” Edin told me. Even today, she says, men’s identities are far more defined by their work than women’s, and both men and women become extremely uncomfortable when men’s work goes away.

  The national divorce rate fell slightly in 2008, and again in 2009, and that’s not unusual in a recession: divorce is expensive, and many couples delay it in hard times. But joblessness corrodes marriages, and makes divorce much more likely down the road. According to W. Bradford Wilcox, the director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, the gender imbalance of the job losses in this recession is particularly noteworthy, and—when combined with the depth and duration of the jobs crisis—poses “a profound challenge to marriage,” especially in lower-income communities. It may sound harsh, but in general, he says, “if men can’t make a contribution financially, they don’t have much to offer.” Two-thirds of all divorces are legally initiated by women, and women who earn substantially more than their husband are vastly more likely to initiate them. Wilcox believes that over the next few years, we may see a long wave of divorces, washing no small number of discarded and dispirited men back into single adulthood.

  Among couples without college degrees, says Edin, marriage has become an “increasingly fragile” institution. In many low-income communities, she fears it is being supplanted as a social norm by single motherhood and revolving-door relationships. As a rule, fewer people marry during a recession, and this one has been no exception. But “the timing of this recession coincides with a pretty significant cultural change,” Edin says: a fast-rising material threshold for marrying, but not for having children, in less affluent communities.

  Edin explains that poor and working-class couples, after seeing the ravages of divorce on their parents or within their communities, have become more hesitant to marry; they believe deeply in marriage’s sanctity, and try to guard against the possibility that theirs will end in divorce. Studies have shown that even small changes in income have significant effects on marriage rates among the poor and the lower middle class. “It’s simply not respectable to get married if you don’t have a job—some way of illustrating to your neighbors that you have at least some grasp on some piece of the American pie,” Edin says. Increasingly, people in these communities see marriage not as a way to build savings and stability, but as “a symbol that you’ve arrived.”

  Childbearing is the opposite story. The stigma against out-of-wedlock children has by now largely dissolved in working-class communities—more than half of all new mothers without a college degree are unmarried. For both men and women in these communities, children are commonly seen as a highly desirable, relatively low-cost way to achieve meaning and bolster identity—especially when other opportunities are closed off. Christina Gibson-Davis, a public-policy professor at Duke University, recently found that among adults with no college degree, changes in income have no bearing at all on rates of childbirth.

  “We already have low marriage rates in low-income communities,” Edin told me, “including white communities. And where it’s really hitting now is in working-class urban and rural communities, where you’re just seeing aston
ishing growth in the rates of nonmarital childbearing. And that would all be fine and good, except these parents don’t stay together. This may be one of the most devastating impacts of the recession.”

  Many children are already suffering in this economic climate, for a variety of reasons. Among poor families, nutrition can be inadequate in hard times, hampering children’s mental and physical development. And regardless of social class, the stresses and distractions that afflict unemployed parents also afflict their kids, who are more likely to repeat a grade in school, and who on average earn less as adults. Children with unemployed fathers seem particularly vulnerable to psychological problems.

  But a large body of research shows that one of the worst things for children, in the long run, is an unstable family. By the time the average out-of-wedlock child has reached the age of five, his or her mother will have had two or three significant relationships with men other than the father, and the child will typically have at least one half sibling. This kind of churning is terrible for children—heightening the risks of mental-health problems, troubles at school, teenage delinquency, and so on—and we’re likely to see more and more of it, the longer this malaise stretches on.

  “We could be headed in a direction where, among elites, marriage and family are conventional, but for substantial portions of society, life is more matriarchal,” says Wilcox. The marginalization of working-class men in family life has far-reaching consequences. “Marriage plays an important role in civilizing men. They work harder, longer, more strategically. They spend less time in bars and more time in church, less with friends and more with kin. And they’re happier and healthier.”