What’s happened to the blue collar male, and why does it matter?

Oct 5

While researching a 2019 bo ok on the shrinking of the American middle class, I discovered the issue of what I called then, in good academic parlance, the “socio-economic decline of males.” Back in 2013 the non-partisan Pew Research Center wrote that there is a “disappearing male worker”. Things have not changed much over the past decade. Just this year, the venerable Washington, D.C. think tank Brook ings Institute confirmed the same. Top econo mists have unpacked the overall trend into the core findings that blue collar males in the U.S. are experiencing higher incarceration rates, dying younger, using drugs more, and marrying less than ever before. Why? Because manufacturing jobs once readily available in developed countries such as the U.S. and Great Britain have eroded.

“there is a profound sadness that has grown alongside this decrease in life prospects among blue collar males.”

But there is more to the story than a set of statistics demonstrating social and economic decline among men who work as laborers. I learned that there is a profound sadness that has grown alongside this decrease in life prospects among blue collar males. The Pew report from 8 years ago uncovered that not only were men having a hard time finding jobs, they were also having a hard time keeping them.

Males are dropping out of the workforce more, and not keeping up in the educational attainments needed to compete successfully in the employment market. A recent article in the Wall Stre et Journa l backs up this early finding almost ten years later, and now, it’s a crisis. The American Economic Association calls this malaise among working class men “The Blue Coll ar Blues.”

“when jobs become unstable, social structures become unstable too, and people drop out of families and the labor market. They grow depressed and hopeless”.

I am not a psychologist. My bailiwick is public policy, but it is clear we are not just dealing here with a bump in the Keynesian economic roadmap of postwar Western democracy. Dep res sion has been documented as more widespread in the blue collar universe than in the white collar world. Suic ides have also surged. Simply put, when jobs become unstable, social structures become unstable too, and people drop out of families and the labor market. They grow depressed and hopeless. The economic manifestation of this crisis is that we are in for a terrifying multi-generational prospect of downward mobility. It doesn’t take more than a second to understand that the widespread loss of economically reliable two-parent homes, combined with men finding less employment and using more drugs, spells dimmed prospects for children born into this environment. Scho lars support the intuitive sense that the initial shock of manufacturing sector job loss a generation ago has morphed into “male idleness, premature mortality, and [a] raise [in] the share of mothers who are unwed and the share of children living in below-poverty, single-headed households.”

There is a vast literature documenting the terrible socio-economic consequences of this loss of the secure middle class family and the decline of regularly employed fathers. Liberal Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam writes that “Increasingly, kids from college-educated homes live in stable, two-parent families, while a growing majority of kids from high-school educated homes live in fragile, one-parent families. These different launching pads powerfully determine their life trajectories.” This chasm in opportunity only adds to the intractability of the income gap and takes a bite out of dem ocr acy. Unive rsity is a necessary first step towards better life prospects, but working class men, and their children, just aren’t getting there.

Pandemics don’t help much either. For all the talk of the restructurin g of work, the daily reality of those few who are indeed able to find and sustain reliable blue collar employment is that they are in a more dangerous position than those in white collar jobs. Regardless of the boon in remote employment during the time of COVID, that kind of white collar work is the antithesis of the essence of hands-on manual labor. The Financia l Times reports that male manual workers are “twice as likely” to die from COVID-19. In fact, in Britain, they accounted for two-thirds of almost 2,500 coronavirus-related deaths in adults aged 20-64 that had been reported by April 2020 in England and Wales, or 9.9 per 100,000 men, according to the Office for National Statistics.

“There are calls for the newly formed White House Gender Policy Council to be more inclusive and incorporate the kinds of issues discussed here that impact males.”

The picture then may be bleak, but that’s when good public policy is most needed. Given we are talking about nothing less than a basic belief that democracy ought to offer the chance at realizing individual potential, something urgent needs to be done. Hopelessness begets a politics of desperation, which can harm both free expression and free markets. We need to address this situation right now. The first step is to recognize that the blue collar male deserves much more attention. In the U.S., there is now the beginning of recognition regarding the gender gap in education, thanks to articles such as those cited earlier from the Wall Street Journal, as well as organizations such as The Boys Initiativ e. There are calls for the newly formed White Ho use Gend er Policy Council to be more inclusive and incorporate the kinds of issues discussed here that impact males. Globally, scholars and policy makers should convene and form a congress to address the social impact of the loss of manufacturing. Given the “blue-collar blues” among working class men, addressing male joblessness and educational attainment have to be important sections in this research and policy think tank. The future of healthy democracies, in which all participants feel they have the potential to realize their aspirations for a better life, rests upon this work.

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