"Men ages 35 to 44 are staging a
lackluster rebound from pandemic job loss, despite a strong economy.
For the past five months Paul Rizzo,
38, has been delivering food and groceries through the DoorDash app. But he
spent the first half of 2022 earning no paycheck at all — reflecting a
surprising trend among middle-aged men.
After learning last Christmas that
his job as an analyst at a hospital company was being automated, Mr. Rizzo
chose to stay at home to care for his two young sons. His wife wanted to go
back to work, and he was discouraged in his own career after more than a decade
of corporate tumult and repeated disappointment. He thought he might be able to
earn enough income on his investments to pull it off financially.
Mr. Rizzo’s decision to step away
from employment during his prime working years hints at one of the biggest
surprises in today’s job market: Hundreds of thousands of men in their late 30s
and early 40s stopped working during the pandemic and have lingered on the labor
market’s sidelines since. While Mr. Rizzo has recently returned to earning
money, many men his age seem to be staying out of the work force altogether.
They are an anomaly, as employment rates have rebounded more fully for women of
the same age and for both younger and older men.
About 89.7 percent of men ages 35 to
44 were working or looking for work as of November, down sharply from 90.9
percent before the pandemic.
The group’s employment rate showed
signs of rebounding last month, but has been unusually depressed on average
over the past year.
The decline in labor force
participation among middle-aged men has spanned racial groups, but it has been
most heavily concentrated among men who — like Mr. Rizzo — do not have a
four-year college degree. The pullback comes despite the fact that wages are
rising and job openings are plentiful, including in fields like truck driving
and construction, where college degrees are not required and men tend to
dominate.
Economists have not determined any
single factor that is keeping men from returning to work. Instead, they
attribute the trend to a cocktail of changing social norms around parenthood
and marriage, shifting opportunities, and lingering scars of the 2008 to 2009
downturn — which cost many people in that age group jobs just as they were
starting their careers.
“Now, all of a sudden, you’re kind
of getting your life together, and if you’re in the wrong industry …” Mr. Rizzo
said, trailing off as he discussed his recent labor market experience. “I
wasn’t the only one who dropped out. I can tell you that.”
Men have been withdrawing from the
labor force for decades. In the years following World War II, more than 97
percent of men in their prime working years — defined by economists as ages 25
to 54 — were working or actively looking for work, according to federal data.
But starting in the 1960s, that share began to fall, mirroring the decline in
domestic manufacturing jobs.
What is new is that a small
demographic slice — men who were early in their careers during the 2008
recession — seems to be most heavily affected.
“I think there’s a lot of very discouraged
people out there,” said Jane Oates, a former Labor Department official who now
heads WorkingNation, a nonprofit focused on work force development.
Men lost jobs in astonishing numbers
during the 2008 financial crisis as the construction and home-building
industries contracted. It took years to regain that ground — for men who were
then in their 20s and early 30s and just getting started in their careers, employment
rates never fully recovered.
Economists came up with a range of
explanations for the men’s slow return to the labor force. After the war on
crime of the 1980s and 1990s, more men had criminal records that made it
difficult to land jobs. The rise of opioid addiction had sidelined others.
Video games had improved in quality,
so staying home might have become more attractive.
And the decline of nuclear family units may
have diminished the traditional male role as economic provider.
Now, recent history appears to be
repeating itself — but for one specific age group. The question is why 35- to
44-year-old men seem to be staying out of work and job searches more than other
demographics.
Patricia Blumenauer, vice president
of data and operations at Philadelphia Works, a work force development agency,
said she had observed a dip in the number of men in that age range coming in
for services. A disproportionately high share of those who do come in leave
without taking a job.
Ms. Blumenauer said that age range
is a group “that we’re not seeing show up.”
She thinks some men who lost their
blue-collar jobs early in the pandemic may be looking for something with
flexibility and higher pay. “The ability to work from home three days a week,
or have a four-day weekend — things that other jobs have figured out — aren’t
possible for those types of occupations.”
When men don’t find those flexible
jobs or can’t compete for them, they might choose to make ends meet by staying
with relatives or doing under-the-table work, Ms. Blumenauer said.
The pandemic has probably also
slowed America’s already-weak family formation, giving single or childless men
less of an incentive to settle into steady jobs, said the economist Ariel
Binder. On the flip side, disruptions to schooling and child care meant that
some men who already had families may have stopped doing paid work to take on
more household tasks.
“So on the one hand you get these
men who are just not expecting to have a stable romantic relationship for most
of their lives and are setting their time use accordingly,” Dr. Binder said.
“Then there are men who are participating in these family structures, but doing
so in nontraditional ways.”
Like labor force experts, government
data suggest that a combination of forces are at play.
A growing number of men do seem to
be taking on more child care duties, time use and other survey data suggests.
But a shift toward being stay-at-home dads is unlikely to be the full story:
Employment trends look the same for men in the age group who report having
young kids living with them and those who don’t.
What clearly does matter is education.
The participation decline is more heavily concentrated among people who have
not graduated from college, based on detailed government survey data.
Some economists speculate that the
disproportionate decline could be because the age group has been buffeted by
repeated crises, making their labor market footing fragile. They lost work
early in their careers in 2008, faced a slow recovery after and found their
jobs at risk again amid 2020 layoffs and an ongoing shift toward automation.
“This group has been hit by
automation, by globalization,” said David Dorn, a Swiss economist who studies
labor markets.
That fragility theory makes sense to
Mr. Rizzo.
He had seen the Navy as his ticket
out of poverty in Louisiana and had expected to have a career in the service
until he broke his back during basic training. He retired from the military
after a few years. Then he pivoted, earning a two-year degree in Georgia and
beginning a bachelor’s degree at Arizona State University — with dreams of one
day working to cure cancer.
Then the Great Recession hit. Mr.
Rizzo had been working nights in a laboratory to afford rent and tuition, but
the job ended abruptly in 2009. Phoenix was ground zero for the financial
implosion’s fallout.
Frantic job applications yielded
nothing, and Mr. Rizzo had to drop out of school. Worse, he found himself
staring down imminent homelessness. His tax refund saved him by allowing him
and his wife to move back to Louisiana, where jobs were more plentiful. But
after they divorced, he hit a low point.
“I had nothing to show for my life
after my 20s,” he explained.
Mr. Rizzo spent the next decade
rebuilding. He worked his way through various corporate positions where he
taught himself skills in Excel and Microsoft SharePoint, married again, had two
sons and bought a house.
Yet he was regularly at risk of
losing work to downsizing or technology — including late last year. The company
he worked for wanted him to move into a new role, perhaps as a traveling
salesperson, when his desk job disappeared. But his sons have special needs and
that was not an option.
He quit in January. He watched the
kids, posted on his investment-related YouTube channel and watched Netflix. He
thought he might be able to live on military payments and dividend income,
becoming part of the “Financial Independence, Retire Early,” or FIRE, trend.
But then the Federal Reserve raised interest rates and markets gyrated.
“I got FIRE, all right,” he said.
“My whole portfolio got set on fire.”
Mr. Rizzo turned to DoorDash,
earning his first paycheck on July 4. While he is technically back in the labor
market, gig work like his isn’t well measured in jobs data. If many men are
taking a similar path but do not work every week, they might be overlooked in
surveys, which ask if someone worked for pay in the previous week to determine
whether they were employed.
Mr. Rizzo is waiting to see what
happens to his DoorDash income in an economic pullback before he rules out
corporate work forever. Already, other dashers are complaining that business is
slowing as people have spent down pandemic savings.
The veteran counts himself
fortunate. He knows men in his generation who have struggled to find any
footing in the labor market.
“It feels like it’s the
after-effects of 2008 and 2009,” he said. “Everyone had to restart their lives
from scratch.”"
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