Another day means some more lawn mower action, laundry, vacuuming, pet maintenance and meal prep. I don't need to shop, or get down to my dad's to run the necessary errands for him, or chore up at his place on some overdue project his failing lungs prohibit him from getting done. Busy with the busy work these days, just like my manly neighbors Rich, Gino, Joe and Dustin. I watch them out watering, gardening and generally puttzing around their houses while their wives are off at work.
Sometimes the reward for doing the job for its own sake, and the gratitude it engenders, is enough. Sometimes getting cut out of the workforce with precious little chance of re-entry takes a terrible toll on the psyche. Easy answers or understandable explanations are in extremely rare supply for today's job situation.
I found an article discussing how valuable my services are in this day and age. The article was one of those feel good Mother's Day pieces targeted for .... moms who stay at home. The column's basic premise, aside from lifting a stay-at-home mom's spirit, was that she should be making roughly $135,000 a year for all she does. Not having a uterus, or kids at home, I deducted a big chunk from this total and came up for launderer, bartender, gardener, cook, merry maid, pet sitter and psychologist at a figure just under a hundred grand. I almost felt better until I realized, maybe not as quickly as I might have a decade ago, that the column had no employers at the end of the piece looking to reward my peculiar services at the estimated rate of pay. Never was, and never will be a market to reward people looking after and picking up their own shit. The job is worthless, even in this global economy.
I know I've got a ton of extended male company these days. More men have been shown the door during this recession than ever before in the history of this nation. Intellectuals and think tankers have already described our nation's "little" downturn as the Great Recession. And that is no mean feat given the crashes of the stock market in 1973 and 1987. Today is different in that the job losses since this financial collapse began in December of 2007 has seen men receive close to 80% of all the pink slips handed out by the contracting industrialists.
There are reasons why the disproportionate share of current job loss has gone to men. Two of the hardest hit sectors of the declining labor force are in construction and manufacturing. Health and education where women enjoy far superior numbers in the work force have not been hit as hard. Another factor is that the higher paid employees are men. A man still makes significantly more than a woman doing the same job. The latest figures I found from 2007 government data showed women earning 77.8 percent of what their male counterpart earns for the same position.
If a company is determined to maximize saved dollars with a job loss then men are the way to go.
Another major reason for men being more expendable in today's world is found in the growing disparity of college enrollment numbers for men and women. These numbers stagger the brain. Women make up 57% of all college attendees, and graduate at each upper education level significantly higher percentages of students than men. These numbers are the reverse of what they were only forty years ago, and the trend is to see an even wider gender disparity in the various colleges going forward. Men dropped out of school and now are being dropped from the job market.
I'm glad I have a degree, but it has not gotten me very far these past four years. However, the degree certainly helped during the twenty years of peak earnings in the bygone business era I was part of. I'm heading to see my youngest son graduate in about two weeks, but his prospects, and those of his older brother, look a sight grim. The second highest rate of unemployment in the typical age demographics is to be found in the bracket my youngest finds himself in. From the above link to Business Week, you can see all age groups for men are at, or close to historic levels of unemployment.
Very shortly the axe is going to fall on a lot of car dealerships for Chrysler and General Motors, which will only darken the really depressing unemployment picture. I am not sure what investors or the remaining large corporations want any more, but it does not appear to be in job creation.
Let me give you an example of American conglomerates taking job loss to the bank. I have been following developments of the tiered pricing schemes Comcast and Warner Cable are in various stages of trying to develop. Warner scrapped its plans after all the commotion grass roots geeks raised in opposition to the plan. The interesting point of the the cable companies desire to raise prices on heavier users is that without the rate increases the companies saw great revenues recently. Revenue increases were up over 5%, along with a growing subscription base, all the while both Warner and Comcast were cutting capital spending by close to 20%. It is always the short term strategy of quick profits with unnecessary price increases that get fed while costs for infrastructure to the greater benefit of the consumer and the job world get strangled.
At the time the US was engaged in the Korean War, Kurt Vonnegut had his first novel, Player Piano, published. I read it many years ago, and though it was never on my fave Vonnegut story list, the damn story stayed with me. It took fifty-seven years, but much of what Vonnegut talked about in the book has come to pass. The few owners of everything don't need men to work the machine.
I get out the wire hair brush to work out the mats in my dog's fur before plugging in the guitar to jam with my programmed Casio keyboard. My hat's on the floor, drying after a hard round with the yard. It's 11AM, and a young boy rolls down the sidewalk alone on his skateboard.
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