Pinched (17 page)

“
I’m deeply concerned” about the prospects of less-skilled men, says Bruce Weinberg, an economist at Ohio State. “Looking over the past forty years, deindustrialization has been bad for men.” Weinberg’s research has shown that in occupations in which “people skills” are becoming more important, employment is skewing more and more toward women. And that category of occupations is large indeed. In his National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, “People People,” Weinberg and his two coauthors found that interpersonal skills typically become more important and more highly valued in occupations in which computer use is prevalent and growing, and in which teamwork is important. They also become more important in “firms which have recently gone through organizational changes,” as so many have in this recession. Even for jobs in traditionally masculine fields like home improvement, people skills
and customer service have arguably become more important than they used to be.

In surveys,
women are more likely than men to say they are effective at “people tasks.” They’re also more cooperative in Prisoner’s Dilemma games (in which teamwork is necessary to the achievement of the best result for both players). Needless to say, a great many men have excellent people skills, just as a great many men do well in school. And many of the differences we observe between the genders may be the result of culture rather than genetics. All that notwithstanding, a meaningful minority of men have struggled badly as the economy has evolved, and have shown few signs of successful adaptation.

Many
women are also struggling because of the recession. After the crash, in 2009, the unemployment rate among single mothers was 13.6 percent. And indeed,
while employment among women with only a high-school degree rose sharply from the mid-1960s through 2000, it has declined somewhat since then (albeit less dramatically than it has for men). The disappearance of middle-skill jobs has hurt members of both sexes, and has increased the number of men and women who drift in and out of the labor force, weakly attached to low-wage, low-status, generally unpleasant jobs at the bottom of the economy.

Nonetheless, the structural changes in the economy, accelerated by the recession, have been hardest on men. And male unemployment, historically, has been hardest on society. Three years after the crash, its social consequences are becoming visible once again.

“I
LIKE IT
outside, you know?” said Frank Massoli (a pseudonym), a former construction foreman who lives outside Reading, Pennsylvania, in December 2010. “You see all these office buildings—you stick me in one of them, I’d be completely clueless.… I don’t like being penned up with the same people each day.”

Massoli, a stocky, balding forty-seven-year-old with fat brown
sideburns and a thick, hoop-shaped silver earring, has worked much of his life outside; at different times, he’s been a well-digger and a construction worker. Long ago, he worked in a factory, but he lost that job in his twenties. Before the recession, he was a foreman with a small construction outfit. “Things were pretty good,” he said. “I was working six days a week, we went to Outback Steakhouse once a month. We were doing pretty good.”

In July 2008, he lost that job, and couldn’t find another one for more than two years. By 2010, his wife had left and they’d split custody of their eight adopted children. Four initially lived with him, although a fifteen-year-old daughter went to live with her mother after she became pregnant and stole money from Massoli.

Over those two years, Massoli went to some meetings for the unemployed sponsored by his church—“I was feeling pretty down,” he said, and he thought he could use some guidance and support. But he says he wasn’t qualified for the jobs that were posted by the group—most of them were in customer service or required more than a high-school degree—and he didn’t feel like he fit in. He stopped going after he had a run-in with a human-resources consultant the group had brought in. She told him that he would have a hard time getting hired outside of construction, given the way he was describing himself and one of his past employers, for whom he had little respect. “And I was like, ‘Kiss my ass.’ ” He’d never been the sort to sugarcoat things, he told me. He was a good worker, he said, and that’s what should count.

Massoli said he’d looked for a job daily since he’d gotten laid off—in construction, delivery, machine operation, kitchen work. He was occasionally able to get some part-time work with his cousin, laying carpet. He knew there were government-sponsored retraining programs available, but he felt he was too old for that, and besides, he’d never been much of a classroom guy.

As time went by, with his savings exhausted and bills going unpaid, he began rooting through neighbors’ garbage at night, looking for scrap he might be able to sell. “I’m a hustler,” he said. “And I
had no health insurance. I was divorced.” He’d go out in his pickup with his kids at about six in the evening and cruise around until nine or nine thirty, looking through people’s trash. Then he’d get up at about three in the morning and cruise around again for three or four hours on his own. He quickly learned the trash-pickup schedule for neighborhoods as far as thirty miles from his house. “I only took what people left out,” he told me, although he wouldn’t talk about his scavenging until I agreed not to use his real name. “There was competition,” he said. “I remember one night driving around a corner, and I missed a washing machine, which is worth like twenty bucks, by like ten seconds, because someone got there before me.”

His kids would help him tear apart the appliances they found, separating out the coated wire, brass fittings, and other components that could be resold. He would fix old lawn mowers he’d picked up, and resell them. Usually, he could make $75 or more a day, though fuel for his truck ate pretty heavily into that. He feared getting sick, because he had no health insurance—but also because he was living hand-to-mouth and couldn’t afford days off.

To his great relief, in August 2010 Massoli found steady work again, digging geothermal wells with a company he used to work for long ago. “It’s hard,” he said, “and I’m not young.” It didn’t pay nearly what his job as a construction foreman did, but it had health benefits and was steady—though he didn’t know if it would remain that way. The company was not doing well, he said, but the checks were still clearing. He’d bought a good steak and cooked it up for his kids recently. “I got bills to pay,” he said. “But you got to do something once in a while.” I asked him what would happen if the company were to fail. “I’ll be back to scrappin’. What else am I gonna do?”

N
UCLEAR FAMILIES, WITH
both parents present in the home, are of course less the norm today than they used to be. And “traditional” marriages, in which men engage in paid work and women in homemaking,
have long been in eclipse. Particularly in blue-collar families, where many husbands and wives work staggered shifts, men routinely handle a lot of the child care. Still, the ease with which gender bends in modern marriages should not be overestimated. When men stop doing paid work—and even when they work less than their wives—marital conflict usually follows.

Between 2007 and 2010, calls to the National Domestic Violence Hotline rose continually, by almost 20 percent in total; as was the case during the Depression, unemployed men are vastly more likely to beat their wives or children.
More common than violence, though, is a sort of passive-aggressiveness. In
Identity Economics
, the economists George Akerloff and Rachel Kranton find that among married couples, men who aren’t working at all, despite their free time, do only 37 percent of the housework, on average. And some men, apparently in an effort to guard their masculinity, actually do less housework after becoming unemployed.

Many working women struggle with the idea of partners who aren’t breadwinners. “We’ve got this image of Archie Bunker sitting at home, grumbling and acting out,” says Kathryn Edin, a professor of public policy at Harvard, and an expert on family life. “And that does happen. But you also have women in whole communities thinking,
This guy’s nothing.
” Edin’s research in low-income communities shows, for instance, that most working women whose partner stayed home to watch the kids—while very happy with the quality of child care their children’s father provided—were dissatisfied with their relationship overall. “These relationships were often filled with conflict,” Edin told me. Even today, she says, men’s identities are far more defined by their work than women’s, and both men and women become extremely uncomfortable when men’s work goes away.

The national divorce rate fell slightly in 2008, and again in 2009, and that’s not unusual in a recession: divorce is expensive, and many couples delay it in hard times. But joblessness corrodes marriages, and makes divorce much more likely down the road. According to
W. Bradford Wilcox, the director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, the gender imbalance of the job losses in this recession is particularly noteworthy, and—when combined with the depth and duration of the jobs crisis—poses “a profound challenge to marriage,” especially in lower-income communities. It may sound harsh, but in general, he says, “if men can’t make a contribution financially, they don’t have much to offer.” Two-thirds of all divorces are legally initiated by women, and women who earn substantially more than their husband are vastly more likely to initiate them. Wilcox believes that over the next few years, we may see a long wave of divorces, washing no small number of discarded and dispirited men back into single adulthood.

Among couples without college degrees, says Edin, marriage has become an “increasingly fragile” institution. In many low-income communities, she fears it is being supplanted as a social norm by single motherhood and revolving-door relationships. As a rule, fewer people marry during a recession, and this one has been no exception. But “the timing of this recession coincides with a pretty significant cultural change,” Edin says: a fast-rising material threshold for marrying, but not for having children, in less affluent communities.

Edin explains that poor and working-class couples, after seeing the ravages of divorce on their parents or within their communities, have become more hesitant to marry; they believe deeply in marriage’s sanctity, and try to guard against the possibility that theirs will end in divorce. Studies have shown that even small changes in income have significant effects on marriage rates among the poor and the lower middle class. “It’s simply not respectable to get married if you don’t have a job—some way of illustrating to your neighbors that you have at least some grasp on some piece of the American pie,” Edin says. Increasingly, people in these communities see marriage not as a way to build savings and stability, but as “a symbol that you’ve arrived.”

Childbearing is the opposite story. The stigma against out-of-wedlock children has by now largely dissolved in working-class
communities—more than half of all new mothers without a college degree are unmarried.
For both men and women in these communities, children are commonly seen as a highly desirable, relatively low-cost way to achieve meaning and bolster identity—especially when other opportunities are closed off. Christina Gibson-Davis, a public-policy professor at Duke University, recently found that among adults with no college degree, changes in income have no bearing at all on rates of childbirth.

“We already have low marriage rates in low-income communities,” Edin told me, “including white communities. And where it’s really hitting now is in working-class urban and rural communities, where you’re just seeing astonishing growth in the rates of nonmarital childbearing. And that would all be fine and good, except these parents don’t stay together. This may be one of the most devastating impacts of the recession.”

Many children are already suffering in this economic climate, for a variety of reasons. Among poor families, nutrition can be inadequate in hard times, hampering children’s mental and physical development. And regardless of social class, the stresses and distractions that afflict unemployed parents also afflict their kids, who are more likely to repeat a grade in school, and who on average earn less as adults. Children with unemployed fathers seem particularly vulnerable to psychological problems.

But a large body of research shows that one of the worst things for children, in the long run, is an unstable family. By the time the average out-of-wedlock child has reached the age of five, his or her mother will have had two or three significant relationships with men other than the father, and the child will typically have at least one half sibling. This kind of churning is terrible for children—heightening the risks of mental-health problems, troubles at school, teenage delinquency, and so on—and we’re likely to see more and more of it, the longer this malaise stretches on.

“We could be headed in a direction where, among elites, marriage and family are conventional, but for substantial portions of
society, life is more matriarchal,” says Wilcox. The marginalization of working-class men in family life has far-reaching consequences. “Marriage plays an important role in civilizing men. They work harder, longer, more strategically. They spend less time in bars and more time in church, less with friends and more with kin. And they’re happier and healthier.”

One 2005 study shows that after marriage, men begin to work more hours than they used to, and eventually earn higher wages than their single counterparts; all in all, marriage adds nearly 20 percent to their income over time. Higher incomes, meanwhile, encourage men to stay married. And so, where the economy is healthy and marriage is the norm, a virtuous circle sets in, one that has benefited most American communities for most of America’s history.

By contrast, communities with large numbers of unmarried,
jobless men take on an unsavory character over time. Edin’s research team spent part of the summer of 2009 in Northeast and South Philadelphia, conducting in-depth interviews with residents. She says she was struck by what she saw: “These white working-class communities—once strong, vibrant, proud communities, often organized around big industries—they’re just in terrible straits. The social fabric of these places is just shredding. There’s little engagement in religious life, and the old civic organizations that people used to belong to are fading. Drugs have ravaged these communities, along with divorce, alcoholism, violence. I hang around these neighborhoods in South Philadelphia, and I think,
This is beginning to look like the black inner-city neighborhoods we’ve been studying for the past 20 years
. When young men can’t transition into formal-sector jobs, they sell drugs and drink and do drugs. And it wreaks havoc on family life. They think,
Hey, if I’m 23 and I don’t have a baby, there’s something wrong with me
. They’re following the pattern of their fathers in terms of the timing of childbearing, but they don’t have the jobs to support it. So their families are falling apart—and often spectacularly.”