The Rise In Structural Unemployment
Change in Unemployment Rate By Country
By any measure this has been a hard and long recession, and many of us are not convinced it is over. Particularly worrisome is the millions of men who have dropped off the face of employment statistics. Men who have just disappeared. No statistic the Federal Government keeps tracks them. If they are working its in the cash underground or by barter or combination of or just wearing out the couch. These men having exhausted their unemployment don’t even show in the state numbers.
Giving voice to this statistic is the Structural Unemployment number traditionally around 2%, representing the people who don’t work and aren’t looking for work, the long term unemployed. The chart (Reuters) suggests this rate maybe more like 4.5% now twice the rate of any European country.
The share of American men aged 16 to 64 who are employed has fallen from nearly 85 percent in the early 1950s to less than 65 percent now. This is a really big deal, millions of men have dropped out and are not participating in the American economy. We have no experience with what the social ramifications will be, a huge rise in crime comes to mind.
Some estimates put every 1 in 5 young men out of work, and this does not include those in school, or who have part time jobs. This is a critical time for those men, work habits are established and a career basis is formed. The start of their life wealth is being seriously delayed, if it ever starts at all.
Chairman of the Texas Workforce Commission Tom Pauken writes:
One reason that men’s employment rate lags behind is that there has been negative growth in the types of jobs men historically have occupied. In the last 10 years, 5.5 million manufacturing jobs were lost. That’s one-third of our manufacturing base in an industry where men make up 70 percent of the workforce. In construction, where 87 percent of positions are filled by men, more than 1.4 million jobs went away during that time frame. Approximately 4.4 million jobs have been added in the education and health care sectors, but women dominate this growing field as they make up 77 percent of the work force.
Bringing manufacturing jobs home is more critical than ever, it’s a National Security issue.
