Slow Disappearance of the American Working Man

U

UT1986

500+ Posts
"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."

Scary! Anybody have any ideas on how to seriously reverse this trend? If you do, maybe you should be running as the next Pres.
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there are some experts that believe the new normal for unemployment is 6.7% and some even higher.
money.cnn.com/2011/02/14/news/economy/fed_unemployment/index.htm

the answers are difficult. In order to have a robust middle class you need more people making better wages but then you make the goods more expensive to make and buy which hurts profits and makes consumers not buy as much. Even if you could get American consumers to "buy American" your exports would still suffer.

While there will be new industries to emerge from technology in the future, by and large technology squeezes humans out of the workforce little by little. And with a rising population to boot, the middle class is left in a substantially weakened negotiating position for wages and employers will take advantage of the at the negotiating table. Wages will continue to rathcet down, unemployment will continue to climb.
 
Do away with government imperatives that promote anything other than market driven hiring. This is what we wanted, this is what we have. The notion we could roughly double the size of the workforce over a couple of decades (whether market forces mandate more workers or not) and not face major social and economic disruptions as a result is unsurprising, and this is one of the unintended consequences.

As an aside, was any of this a prime cause of the erosion of the social fabric and the nation's economic instability over the last several decades? No, of course not, but it's my opinion that it definitely was a contributing factor. It's a question not even asked because of the major third rail implications.
 
Is this a male/female discussion or is 'man' in this case genderless?

There are plenty of gender based programs in the schools these days. Maybe switching the pendulum back towards boys a bit?

I think there was a stat I read a few years ago that 65% or 60+ % of college grads were female now? wtf?
 
Market driven economies. Woah. Now thats some scary stuff......

Higher prices are tempered by what society demands. If society wont pay higher prices, then prices will come down, and those that insist on keeping prices high will lose out.

Ron Paul's whole message I think can be boiled down to this basic fact. Supply, demand, and market value. What are people willing to spend on a given product?

When we artificially inflate and try and control and manipulate the currency and the economy against the free will of the market, you end up screwing everything up.

I dont think we need economics degrees to understand this. I make a certain amount of money each month. I can only spend what I make. Unless you artificially create more money and give it to me, I must live within my means. As a result, I cant get into debt, but I can save and spend wisely and possibly invest what I save. There is little or no debt. There is no crash. There is no default. Investment that is sound and based on a strong plan can succeed but it cant be artificially saved or bailed out. If it is, then where does that come from? Thin air?

I really dont think its all that complicated.
 
Scary! Anybody have any ideas on how to seriously reverse this trend? If you do, maybe you should be running as the next Pres.
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the jobs are here but many americans are unqualified for the jobs becuse our public school system has failed.
 
Why hire americans when you can move your company to some third world dump and pay the workers a pittance. How do all the "market driven" arguments account for this?
 
Well, thats a good question! If American companies want to move offshore, then they shouldnt be considered American companies anymore and they should be taxed like hell.

I think I remember Ross Perot saying that if we pass NAFTA it would destroy the American middle class by shipping our jobs overseas. Am I right in remembering this?

What made America great was its infrastructure. That infrastructure is being hollowed out because of the exodus of industrial/production jobs.

Its a good question though, and Im not sure what the answer is.
 
America is the 2nd largest manufacturing country in the world. We were surpassed this year by China, not because our manufacturing output was declining, but because China's output was increasing at a higher rate than ours.
 
Organized labor has made the cost of American made products uncompetitive for the most part and forced many jobs overseas. Just look at GM--the union would have killed them if not for the Democrats bailing them out for their votes.
 
Here's what Charles Hugh Smith says about creating jobs. Seems to make sense. It would appear to be painful initially, but there really needs to be a total overhaul of our govt. Both major political parties have run this country into the ground within the last 35+ years with the fascist business model or the central-banking-warfare investment model, whichever you prefer. The elite in this country from both parties are laughing all the way to the bank, while the middle class continues to get raped. From Catherine Austin Fitts. "A system in which a small group of ambitious insiders — who more often than not were educated at Harvard, Yale, Princeton and the other Ivy League schools — enjoy centralizing power and advantaging themselves. Paradigms of Republican vs. Democrat or Conservative vs. Progressive have been designed for obfuscation and entertainment."
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1.Write off the trillions of dollars in impaired and bad debt
2.Cut healthcare/sickcare in half to align it with the costs of our developed-world competitors
3.Make starting small business and expanding small business easier by centralizing and speeding up permitting, regulation and oversight functions of overlapping government fiefdoms
Here are more essential steps which must be taken to lower the cost structure and eliminate counter-productive systemic bloat. Covering each topic would take an entire volume, but in shorthand:

1.Rationalize the tax structure to incentivize productivity and labor and disincentivize speculation and arbitraging of global wage and environmental imbalances.
2.Reduce unproductive waste of energy, and lower the cost structure of energy production in the U.S.
3.Eliminate the "war on drugs" and the drug-prison gulag, and transform drug abuse from a law-enforcement issue to a medical-care issue.
4.Reorient the Federal government's vast expenditures on basic research to creating enterprises and jobs.
5.Revolutionize education from the "factory" model to the "workshop" community model.
6.Reorient "free" trade away from ideological excesses of purity and from policies which benefit corporate profits at the expense of employment opportunities.
 
Ag, if that is the case, then what is different now than say, 30 years ago?

When I go to Walmart, every freaking thing in there is made in China. Why cant I find Made in America goods all over the store?

Are we selling all of those to China?
 
articles.sfgate.com/2009-02-17/business/17190961_1_manufacturing-jobs-products-profits

Yes, we still manufacture a lot in terms of value but as mentioned above we manufacture high end items that typically employ high skill/educated workers. So yes, the kids need a better education and skillset to be ready for this ....BUT these types of jobs are also more highly automated and require less blue collar body count, so we employ 7 hi-tech workers at 80K instead of 12 lower skilled workers at 40K. As we lose low end manufacturing, our unemployment rate increases.
 
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