“If the increasing wage gap between high and low earners directly or indirectly affects men’s aggregate labor supply, wage inequality might have carried wider implications to the economy than previously believed,” Wu wrote.
https://fortune.com/2022/12/07/men-dropping-out-work-force-status-study/
Love to turn young people's hopelessness at the ability to get nothing but dead-end jobs into a jab at masculinity
they are lamenting the days of when the men made the money in the household which equated to their social worth, which is not something I will ever mourn or wish for a return to,
it is lamenting wages going down only for non-college educated men. When people get paid like shit they stop showing up for work
This was an interesting escalation into cheering on deaths of despair for the lower class, thanks
'lmao triggered, insecure'
Look at this sociopathic fucking wrecker, incredible empathy on display, shithead. Really espousing our ideals.
Are they really dropping out, or are they dead/dying from covid?
and suicide because their life insurance will provide more for their family than their wages.
The thing about life insurance is that it's hard for you to defend yourself in court after you're dead and especially of you're already poor they'll probably just refuse the claim.
Suicide negates life insurance coverage in most cases for obvious reasons
there's like a vesting period in the ones i've heard of, and there's always riding a bike dangerously.
I guess you could say I'm under employed at the moment and have considered getting a part time job that I could work around, but most of that means interacting with a large swath of the disease ridden public and I'd like to avoid brain damage.
I’d like to avoid brain damage.
As you should. Screw that noise.
one of the things was talking about men from 35-44 so they are probably not dead/dying from covid
There has been about 60,000 deaths from covid in the age range of 30-49. I couldn't find the rate of long covid for that age range, but the cdc estimates about 20 million adults suffer from it.
Absolutely but this article was talking about an increased trend found in non college educated men, and not found in college educated men and women of any education. And everyone is gettin Covid
There may be something to it, but also... the pandemic destroyed a lot of low wage jobs. And I remember the inital covid wave hit low wage workers particularly hard, health wise, because those are jobs typically public facing and you can't do them from home.
I think that's the key implication, especially as boomers fully retire and the consumption decreases to a unsustainable (lmao, it was always unsustainable) level. We are reaching levels of contradiction within capital that Marx called out a century ago (overproduction, insufficient consumption, and rising wage inequality).
I've watched a lot of videos about people who live in tiny / unconventional homes and have considered the logistics of building a hobbit hole somewhere and doing small construction jobs to pay for food / necessities.
Either that or they'll go deal drugs or something. Dropping out of the workforce in the economic sense leaves a lot of possibilities in the informal or dark economy.
Not good possibilities, but evidently not as bad as just grinding your body into dust.
I occasionally see Andrew Tate-adjascent self help shit targeted toward men, all it does is neg you and tear you down, asks you to worship ostentatious displays of wealth, try to sell you something. I feel like a lot of men are constantly exposed to that, or absorb those values through their peers. It's gotta be crushing to work in a warehouse or something and direct all your anger toward yourself rather than your boss.
And if you're a woman you're pretty much guaranteed to have a shit social status at work unless you're a girlboss
Not sayng men don't also feel like shit, just sort of... Welcome to the club, you know? Don't know why the focus of the article is just dudes.
Men without four-year college degrees, between the ages of 25 and 54, have left the workforce in higher numbers than other groups. Non-college-educated men have seen their pay shrink by more than 30% since 1980 compared to the average earnings of all other prime-age workers. Their weekly earnings have declined 17%, while those of college-educated men rose by 20%, adjusting for inflation
non-college educated men had a pay decrease so they left the workforce more
Unlike men, women have not seen the same level of decline in their wages based on education. That group has seen a 32% increase in weekly earnings, irrespective of their educational qualifications.
the trajectories are different so the article focused on men
one sentence
Unlike men, women have not seen the same level of decline in their wages based on education. That group has seen a 32% increase in weekly earnings, irrespective of their educational qualifications.
it didn't mention any changes in womens participation in work from now and pre pandemic
I'm going to call bullshit. I'm going to think that these guys don't give a shit about 'social standing' (if they did they would have gone to college) which is part of the reason they are dropping out.
While I think that the article misses (which is what most articles of this type miss), is that the jobs that these non-college going men are doing and dropping out from are usually incredibly physically demanding. Like as in more than likely in violation of OSHA standards levels of physically demanding. In the past, the only thing that made these jobs doable was the increased paycheck.
Now though, with office jobs, fast food, and retail paying about the same if abit less, most of these guys are going to go work there, go part time on a night shift gas station or go chop trees under the table and not pay taxes (this is the big one). There's no longer any actual reward for hard physical labor in a manufacturing context, so why bother? Why break your body when you can just do alot less? And this is besides the point that alot of these guys bodies are fucked from this kind of labor already.
That's kind of what this article is about. They said social standing is tied to how much they are making relative to everyone else. And non college educated men saw wages decreased while college educated men and all women saw it increase
So people don't want to do back breaking labor for shit pay that's worse than what everyone else makes
Except nowhere in the article do they explicitly say that. In fact they don't even imply the 'back breaking labor part'. I had to explicitly state it because it's what I've actually seen.
Instead this article is subtle dumb shit that implies that non-college men are dropping out of the work force because they can't handle women making as much as them, which is something I have rarely, if ever, encountered in that age demographic outside of incredibly conservative circles, most of whom still wouldn't quit because of that issue, they would just bitch about it.
It does not say they can't handle women making more, it says people quit when their wages fall relative to others, including college educated men
Younger white men in particular were more likely to leave when their expected wages fell relative to their more educated peers, according to the Fed study.
It mentions women once to say that they have seen a pay increase regardless of education status.
and they’re leaving in part because of their perceived social status relative to better-educated men of similar age according to a new study from the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston.
Non-college-educated men have seen their pay shrink by more than 30% since 1980 compared to the average earnings of all other prime-age workers. Their weekly earnings have declined 17%, while those of college-educated men rose by 20%, adjusting for inflation. That earnings loss has caused a decline in their social status, prompting them to walk away from work entirely, Pinghui Wu, the author of the study, wrote.
I did add the back breaking work part since you were talking about hard physical labor. The article does not say what jobs the non-college educated men were doing but some of those jobs with declining wages would be like that
Now though, with office jobs, fast food, and retail paying about the same if abit less, most of these guys are going to go work there
except you're competing against college kids for those jobs and they have the advantage
Not really, college kids have all kinds of scheduling issues and are notorious for showing up to work late and/or drunk. If you have a decent resume with consistent work experience, as an older white man, you'll out-compete college kids any day.
If you have a felony, drug or attendance issues, it's a harder sell.
This article is redirecting attention away from the escalating exploitation of capital to these men who either are or aren’t right to have feeling about their wage and we should all fight about that rather than ascribe the labor exit to capitalism. This article is psychological warfare.
Isn't the article about reduced wages? ( increased explotiation) . The way I read it it's directing from these men leaving work to the wages of the work
I’m a lib and didn’t read it but the headline is a trap. It’s baiting us to be mad at men who refuse low wage work. “Nobody wants to work because of their male fragility.” It’s a fact that men aren’t alright… but neither is the average wage and only one of these things is being summoned to mind in the headline and excerpt.
Lol sorry it took so long to reply. My reaction is based solely on what you can see in the image so it might be way off.
I agree the headline is trying to get that reaction out of people. Focussing the on wages is a lot less contreversial so less attention
