[NJFAC] The New Gender Gaps: What to do as men and boys fall behind

The New Gender Gaps What to do as men and boys fall behind by Nina Pasquini  https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2025/05/harvard-men-gender-gap-education-employment

The election made clear that certain parts of the country were struggling more than others. Just how much became clearer in 2018, when three Harvard economists—Eliot University Professor Lawrence H. Summers, Glimp professor of economics Edward Glaeser, and then-doctoral student Benjamin Austin—mapped the geography of male joblessness (see "Fixing America's Heartland," September-October 2018, p. 8). The phenomenon was concentrated in what they called the "eastern heartland," the stretch of states from Mississippi to Michigan.

The level of variation they uncovered was astonishing. In 2016, just 5 percent of men in Alexandria, Virginia (a wealthy suburb of Washington, D.C.), were not employed. In Flint, Michigan, that figure was 51 percent. The costs extend far beyond lost paychecks, Glaeser says, because "for men, the correlation between life satisfaction and not working is just enormous." For those aged 25 to 54, not having a job strongly predicts unhappiness, suicide, divorce, and opioid use—more than it does for unemployed women, or even men in low-wage jobs.....

In 2015, Furman believed the main reason for male joblessness was simple: not enough jobs. Now, he's not so sure. When the pandemic began in 2020, women's employment fell more than men's, since they were overrepresented in the hard-hit service industry and took on more childcare. But today, prime-age women's employment rate has surpassed pre-pandemic levels. Prime-age men's employment continues to lag—despite a "huge number of job openings" through 2021 and 2022, Furman says.

"Even if there are help wanted signs in their town, why are they not signing up for those jobs?"

To understand why, Furman thinks research should further examine regional variability in employment opportunities. There are also questions for sociologists and psychologists to explore, he says: "Even if there are help wanted signs in their town, why are they not signing up for those jobs?"....

I am forwarding this article and message from a GoodJobs member. He says, "Employment does not have only economic dimensions- the psychological dimensions are at least as important.  A guaranteed annual income does not cut it."

i'd give more weight than the article does to the ever-present problem of unemployment. This begins with teens, where there is also a male/female disparity. The teen years are when non-college people enter the labor force. If that is difficult, potential workers get less experience of the workplace. There was an upward trend of male teen U through 2010. In April 2025, the last month available, 15% of young men were unemployed vs 9.5% for young women, with an overall rate of 4.2%. There are additional problems posed to young people--miserable pay and transport issues--many communities have no public transportation. How many young people can afford a car? A working person has costs--clothing and its upkeep and transportation. How much is left after a minimum wage and perhaps only part-time work? jz

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June Zaccone
National Jobs for All Network
http://www.njfac.org

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[NJFAC] Now bosses come for tech workers, too Cory Doctorow

Pluralistic: The enshittification of tech jobs Cory Doctorow, April 27, 2025

"Take Google, where founder Sergey Brin just told his workers that they should be aiming for a "sweet spot" of 60 hours/week. Brin returned to Google to oversee its sweaty and desperate "pivot to AI," and like so many tech execs, he's been trumpeting the increased productivity that chatbots will deliver for coders. But a coder who picks up their fired colleagues' work load by pulling 60-hour work-weeks isn't "more productive," they're more exploited.

Tech workers are workers, and they once held the line against enshittification, refusing to break the things they'd built for their bosses in meaningless all-nighters motivated by vocational awe. Long after tech bosses were able to buy all their competitors, capture their regulators, and expand IP law to neutralize the threat of innovative, interoperable products like alternative app stores, ad-blockers and jailbreaking kits, tech workers held the line....

There've been half a million US tech layoff since 2023. Tech workers' scarcity-derived power has been vaporized. Tech workers can avoid the fate of the factory, warehouse and delivery workers their bosses literally work to death – but only by unionizing....."

link at nakedcapitalism

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June Zaccone
National Jobs for All Network
http://www.njfac.org

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[NJFAC] Mfg jobs decline from imports not only productivity--Dean Baker

Trump's Tariffs Address Yesterday's Problem Dean Baker May 13, 2025

Contrary to what some economist types tell you, trade really was a huge hit to large chunks of the working class. While manufacturing jobs have been dropping as a share of total employment since the 1970s, it was only in the decade of the 00s, when the trade deficit exploded, that we actually lost large numbers of manufacturing jobs.

In the 00s we lost 5.8 million jobs, or one-third of all the manufacturing jobs that existed at the start of the decade. States like Michigan and Ohio lost more than 40 percent of their manufacturing jobs. That looks like a pretty big deal.

It's also worth pointing out that most of these jobs were lost before the onset of the Great Recession. We had lost almost 4 million jobs by December of 2007, the official start date of the Great Recession. In the 30 years from 1970 to 2000 we lost just 200,000 manufacturing jobs.

We also have gained back a modest number of manufacturing jobs since 2010 as the trade deficit declined. This means that the economists who tell us the loss of manufacturing jobs was just due to productivity growth, and not trade, have some very strange ideas about productivity growth. It only seems to lead to job loss when the trade deficit rises. (There is an obvious link between trade deficits and productivity growth, but I will leave that one as a homework assignment.)

The story of a massive loss of relatively good-paying manufacturing jobs is a really big deal and the economists who trivialize it are not being honest. But we can't change the past. The question is the best policy going forward.

As I and other economists have pointed out, Trump's trade policy is unlikely to lead to any substantial increase in the number of manufacturing jobs. Even countries like Japan and Germany, with large trade surpluses, have seen a big decline in the shares of the workforce in manufacturing.

Furthermore, the wage premium that workers in manufacturing used to enjoy also has largely gone away. The main reason is that the unionization rate in manufacturing is no longer much higher than in the rest of the private sector. And given the hostility of Donald Trump and Elon Musk to unions, there is not much reason to think that any substantial share of new jobs created in manufacturing will be unionized.

Also, if we are worried about the trade deficit as a problem in itself, Trump is again fighting yesterday's battle. The trade deficit peaked at 6.0 percent of GDP in 2005. It had fallen back to 3.0 percent of GDP last year, although front running of Trump tariffs sent it soaring in the first quarter of this year. Anyhow, if we go to bed at night worried about the trade deficit we have much less to keep us awake today than we did two decades ago.

Even the trade deficit in goods with China, Trump's arch-nemesis, has come down. It was $295.4 billion last year, or 1.0 percent of GDP. That compares to a deficit of $342.6 billion, or 1.6 percent of GDP in 2019. The deficit with China had peaked at $418.2 billion, 1.7 percent of GDP, the prior year. So even if we consider the goods deficit with China to be a big problem, we had gone far towards reducing it before Trump took office.

The big question here is what problem does Trump think he is solving with his tariffs? Based on the pronouncements from Trump and people in his administration, he seems to believe all sorts of crazy things about the world. He seems to think that 20 million people who claim to be over 115 years old are getting Social Security. His Attorney General says that more than half of us would have died from a fentanyl overdose since Trump took office, if not for his seizures of the drug. And we know that he insists global warming is not happening.

It's impossible to know what craziness might motivate Trump's big tariff push. We can be quite certain that it does not address any real-world problems. Although, as many have noted, tariffs create great opportunities for bribes from those seeking exemptions. And we know that Trump has made it as clear as possible, he is open for business.

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June Zaccone
National Jobs for All Network
http://www.njfac.org

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