More young men are giving up on working altogether.
Forget quiet quitting. One huge demographic of American men is quitting the job market completely, with potentially huge impacts on the nationwide labor shortage.
Watching local employers in my small town struggle to find employees has had me revisiting some reporting I did a long time ago and rethinking the conclusions I and others drew at the time.
About fifteen years ago I was on an assignment in Colorado’s San Luis Valley, home to some of the most productive high-altitude agricultural fields in the US, where I came across some intriguing data points and anecdotes alike.
I spoke to farmers who considered themselves party-line Republicans but were quickly modifying their conservative views on immigration as a matter of economic survival. The ideological forcing function at play back then was the matter of their crops — lots of greens, potatoes and beans among other things — literally rotting in the field due to a lack of labor to harvest the food.
Farmers in Colorado were increasingly turning to immigrant labor, both legal and not, to bring the crops in.
“A hay field in the agricultural region known as the San Luis Valley of central Colorado, has been … [+]
That’s an anecdote. Here’s a key data point: this was happening in a county with one of the highest unemployment rates, both in the state and the nation, at the time.
The pro-immigration talking point back then, which still seems to hold true in many places, is that immigrant labor was needed to work in the fields and do the jobs that Americans were no longer willing to do. The situation in the San Luis Valley seemed to illustrate this reality perfectly.
But a new study from the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston suggests the explanation behind an apparently available local labor supply’s unwillingness to get dirty may have been slightly different.
It might not be that Americans, and in particular American men without a college degree, were unwilling to work in the fields. It might be that they had given up on working altogether.
Economist Pinghui Wu suggests that men, especially non-Hispanic white men without a college degree, have left the workforce in droves over the past few decades. This is pretty well-documented, as is the decline in relative earnings for such workers over the past forty years.
But Wu suggests that this dip in earning power doesn’t fully explain the significant exit of working age men (her study looks at men aged 25-54) from the labor force, positing that “deteriorating social status is a plausible key factor driving prime-age men’s declining labor force participation.”
Wu suggests that young men may be bowing out of the job market altogether rather than continuing in the proverbial dead-end job because they see it as potentially sullying their social status and marriage prospects, especially among younger workers.
The data suggest a few other factors may also explain why young working class American men are clocking in nowhere.
“Research and data point to a few other contributing factors besides marriage market sorting: low job satisfaction, disability, and schooling,” Wu writes.
The notion that some men aren’t working because they’re going back to school seems like a potential silver lining to an otherwise dismal narrative, but other research finds that the up-tick in re-schooling for workers has been pretty modest.
Wu points to research from 2017 finding working age men not seeking employment spent twice as much time on leisure activities and sleeping as those with jobs.
“This suggests that most non-participants did not leave the labor force to engage in other non-paid work. Instead, their choice likely reflects a dissatisfaction about work.”
Disability also plays a significant role, with almost 30 percent of men leaving the workforce reporting some sort of condition that limits their ability to work.
There is also a darker element that may be at play, which Wu’s work does not address. Working class men are at especially high risk for addiction.
Back to the anecdotes. In recent months I’ve watched local business owners struggle with a new, post-pandemic labor shortage. When I ask about their experiences trying to hire and retain help in the past two years, addiction struggles among employees comes up time and time again.
We’ll have to wait a little bit for the data to fact check these anecdotes, but I do note that in most cases the employees in question were young men, usually without college degrees.
