More than a day after it was first published, a New York Times article on men who are out of the workforce remains as of midday Tuesday the most e-mailed article on the newspaper's Web site. If you haven’t seen it already, this story of how Bushonomics is failing working Americans is indeed a must-read.
The story is unnecessarily framed in the context of “the new gender divide” and lumps together two categories of men—older workers who lost well-paying jobs and ex-offenders trying to get a foothold in the job market—who deserve separate discussion. Still, as the story points out, the percentage of men between the ages of 30 and 55 who are not working has increased from 5 percent in the 1960s to about 13 percent today. Many of these men once held one of the 3 million manufacturing jobs that the Bureau of Labor Statistics says were lost from 2000 to the end of 2005. Others are refugees from the dot-com bust of the early 2000s. Their choice is to settle for a lower-wage job that often does not use their skills and experience, beat their heads against the wall trying to compete in a workforce that discriminates against older workers—even if they accept the retraining that Republican policymakers think is the magic bullet—or simply survive the best way they can with what resources they have.
The second problem mentioned, too lightly, later in the article is the flood of incarcerated men who are now being released into a workforce who will not hire them. It puts the lie to the administration’s claims of compassionate conservatism and, more specifically, promises made by the administration in its budget message to Congress this year that it wanted to make prisoner reentry programs a serious priority. While federal funding is available for reentry programs, meaningful jobs are not; too few employers want to hire an ex-offender. That is a recipe for keeping frustrated men who feel they have no other choice in a cycle of criminal behavior.
Whatever story comes out of the release of the latest unemployment statistics Friday, it is almost certain that the story will not be about those who are not counted as unemployed—the increasing numbers of people who have despaired of finding their place in this economy. These people need a “No Worker Left Behind” initiative from their political leadership, but since they have no estate tax for Republicans to cut, it seems they will be getting no attention from the crowd that rules Washington.
--Isaiah J. Poole |
Tuesday, August 1, 2006 12:33 PM
