Men Not Working, and Not Wanting Just Any Job
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Men Not Working, and Not Wanting Just Any Job
By LOUIS UCHITELLE and DAVID LEONHARDT
ROCK FALLS, Ill. - Alan Beggerow has stopped looking for work. Laid
off as a steelworker at 48, he taught math for a while at a community
college. But when that ended, he could not find a job that, in his
view, was neither demeaning nor underpaid.
So instead of heading to work, Mr. Beggerow, now 53, fills his days
with diversions: playing the piano, reading histories and biographies,
writing unpublished Western potboilers in the Louis L'Amour style -
all activities once relegated to spare time. He often stays up late and
sleeps until 11 a.m.
"I have come to realize that my free time is worth a lot to me," he
said. To make ends meet, he has tapped the equity in his home through a
$30,000 second mortgage, and he is drawing down the family's savings,
at the rate of $7,500 a year. About $60,000 is left. His wife's
income helps them scrape by. "If things really get tight," Mr.
Beggerow said, "I might have to take a low-wage job, but I don't
want to do that."
Millions of men like Mr. Beggerow - men in the prime of their lives,
between 30 and 55 - have dropped out of regular work. They are
turning down jobs they think beneath them or are unable to find work
for which they are qualified, even as an expanding economy offers
opportunities to work.
About 13 percent of American men in this age group are not working, up
from 5 percent in the late 1960's. The difference represents 4
million men who would be working today if the employment rate had
remained where it was in the 1950's and 60's.
Most of these missing men are, like Mr. Beggerow, former blue-collar
workers with no more than a high school education. But their ranks are
growing at all education and income levels. Refugees of failed Internet
businesses have spent years out of work during their 30's, while
former managers in their late 40's are trying to stretch severance
packages and savings all the way to retirement.
Accumulated savings can make dropping out more affordable at the upper
end than it is for Mr. Beggerow, but the dynamic is often the same -
the loss of a career and of a sense that one's work is valued.
"These are men forced to compete to get back into the work force, and
even then they cannot easily reconstruct what many lost in a former
job," said Thomas A. Kochan, a labor and management expert at the
Sloan School of Management at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
"So they stop trying."
Many of these men could find work if they had to, but with lower pay
and fewer benefits than they once earned, and they have decided they
prefer the alternative. It is a significant cultural shift from three
decades ago, when men almost invariably went back into the work force
after losing a job and were more often able to find a new one that met
their needs.
"To be honest, I'm kind of looking for the home run," said
Christopher Priga, who is 54 and has not had steady work since he lost
a job with a six-figure income as an electrical engineer at Xerox in
2002. "There's no point in hitting for base hits," he explained.
"I've been down the road where I did all the things I was supposed
to do, and the end result of that is nil."
Instead, Mr. Priga supports himself by borrowing against the rising
value of his Los Angeles home. Other men fall back on wives or family
members.
But the fastest growing source of help is a patchwork system of
government support, the main one being federal disability insurance,
which is financed by Social Security payroll taxes. The disability
stipends range up to $1,000 a month and, after the first two years,
Medicare kicks in, giving access to health insurance that for many
missing men no longer comes with the low-wage jobs available to them.
No federal entitlement program is growing as quickly, with more than
6.5 million men and women now receiving monthly disability payments, up
from 3 million in 1990. About 25 percent of the missing men are
collecting this insurance.
The ailments that qualify them are usually real, like back pain, heart
trouble or mental illness. But in some cases, the illnesses are not so
serious that they would prevent people from working if a well-paying
job with benefits were an option.
The disability program, in turn, is an obstacle to working again.
Taking a job holds the risk of demonstrating that one can earn a living
and is thus no longer entitled to the monthly payments. But staying out
of work has consequences. Skills deteriorate, along with the desire for
a paying job and the habits that it requires.
"The longer you stay on disability benefits," said Martin H. Gerry,
deputy commissioner for disability and income security at the Social
Security Administration, "the longer you're out of the work force,
the less likely you are to go back to work."
As a rule, out-of-work men are less educated than the population as a
whole. Their numbers have grown sharply among black men and men who
live in hard-hit industrial areas like Michigan, West Virginia and
upstate New York, as well as those who live in rural states like
Mississippi and Oklahoma.
The missing men are also more likely to live alone. Nearly 60 percent
are divorced, separated, widowed or never married, up from 50 percent a
decade earlier, the Census Bureau reports. Sometimes women who are
working throw out men who are not, says Kathryn Edin, a sociologist at
the University of Pennsylvania. In any case, without a household to
support, there is less pressure to work, and for men who fall behind on
support payments, an incentive exists to work off the books - hiding
employment - so that wages cannot be garnisheed.
"What happens to a lot of guys who become unmoored from family life,
they become unmoored from everything," Ms. Edin said. "They are
just living without attachments and by the time they are 40 or 50 years
old, the things that kept these men from falling away - family and
community life - are gone."
Even as more men are dropping out of the work force, more women are
entering it. This change has occurred partly because employment has
shrunk in industries where men predominated, like manufacturing, while
fields where women are far more common, like teaching, health care and
retailing, have grown. Today, about 73 percent of women between 30 and
54 have a job, compared with 45 percent in the mid-1960's, according
to an analysis of Census data by researchers at Queens College. Many
women without jobs are raising children at home, while men who are out
of a job tend to be doing neither family work nor paid work.
Women are also making inroads in fields where they were once excluded
- as lawyers and doctors, for example, and on Wall Street. Men still
make significantly more money than women, but as women become more
educated than men, even more men may end up out of the work force.
At the low end of the spectrum, men emerging from prison with felony
records are not easily absorbed into steady employment. Hundreds of
thousands of young men were jailed in the 1980's and 1990's, in a
surge of convictions for drug-related crimes. As prisoners, they were
not counted in the employment data; as ex-prisoners they are. They are
now being freed in their 30's and 40's and are struggling to be
hired. Roughly two million men in this group have prison records,
according to a calculation by Richard Freeman and Harry J. Holzer,
labor economists at Harvard and the Urban Institute, respectively.Many
of these men do not find work because of their records.
Despite their great numbers, many of the men not working are missing
from the nation's best-known statistic on unemployment. The jobless
rate is now a low 4.6 percent, yet that number excludes most of the
missing men, because they have stopped looking for work and are
therefore not considered officially unemployed. That makes the
unemployment rate a far less useful measure of the country's
well-being than it once was.
Indeed, a larger share of working-age men are not working today than at
almost any point in the last half-century, which raises the question of
how they will get by as they age. They may be forced back to work after
years of absence, they may fall into poverty, or they may be rescued by
the government. This same trend is evident in other industrialized
countries. In the European Union, 14 percent of men between 25 and 54
were not working last year, up from 7 percent in 1975, according to the
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Over the same
period in Japan, the proportion of such men rose to 8 percent from 4
percent.
In these countries, too, decently paying blue-collar jobs are
disappearing, and as they do men who held them fall back on government
benefits for income. But the growth of subsidies through federal and
state programs like disability insurance has happened largely without
notice in this country while it is a major topic of political debate in
Europe.
"We have a de facto welfare system as Europe does," said Teresa
Ghilarducci, a labor economist at the University of Notre Dame. "But
we are not proud of it, as they are."
Reading, Sleeping, Scraping By
Alan Beggerow has not worked regularly in the five years since the
steel mill that employed him for three decades closed. He and his wife,
Cathleen, 47, cannot really afford to live without his paycheck. Yet
with her sometimes reluctant blessing, Mr. Beggerow persists in
constructing a way of life that he finds as satisfying as the work he
did only in the last three years of his 30-year career at the mill. The
trappings of this new life surround Mr. Beggerow in the cluttered
living room of his one-story bungalow-style home in this half-rural,
half-industrial prairie town west of Chicago. A bookcase covers an
entire wall, and the books that Mr. Beggerow is reading are stacked on
a glass coffee table in front of a comfortable sofa where he reads late
into the night - consuming two or three books a week - many more
than in his working years.
He also gets more sleep, regularly more than nine hours, a
characteristic of men without work. As the months pass, they average
almost nine-and-a-half hours a night, about 80 minutes more than
working men, according to an analysis of time-use surveys by Harley
Frazis and Jay Stewart, economists at the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Very few of the books Mr. Beggerow reads are novels, and certainly not
the escapist Westerns that he himself writes (two in the last five
years), his hope being that someday he will interest a publisher and
earn some money. His own catholic tastes range over history -
currently the Bolshevik revolution and a biography of Charlemagne -
as well as music and the origins of Christianity.
He often has strong views about what he has just read, which he
expresses in reviews that he posts on Amazon.com: 124 so far, he said.
Always on the coffee table is a thick reference work, "Guide to the
Pianist's Repertoire" by Maurice Hinson. Mr. Beggerow is a serious
pianist now that he has the time to practice, sometimes two or three
hours at a stretch. He does so on an old upright in a corner of the
living room, a piano he purchased as a young steelworker, when he first
took lessons.
His new life began in the spring of 2001 with the closing of
Northwestern Wire and Steel in Sterling, Ill., where he had worked
since 1971. During the last three of those 30 years, Mr. Beggerow found
himself assigned to work he really liked: as a union representative on
union-management teams that assessed every aspect of the plant's
operations.
What made him valuable was his dexterity as a writer. No one could put
together committee reports as articulately as he did, and he found
himself on nearly every team. His salary rose to $50,000. During those
years, he taught himself more math, too, to help in the analyses of the
issues that the teams tackled: productivity, safety, plant layout and
the like.
"I actually loved that job," he said. "I even looked forward to
going to work. The more teams they had, the more they found out what I
could do and the more I found out what I could do."
Mr. Beggerow would take another job in a heartbeat, he says, if it were
like the work he did in those last three years at Northwestern. The
closest he has gotten has been as an instructor at a community college,
teaching plant maintenance and other useful factory skills. His
students were from nearby manufacturing companies, which subsidized the
courses, including his pay of $45 an hour. But factory operations in
the area are shrinking, and Mr. Beggerow has not had a teaching stint
since November.
Like Mr. Beggerow, the great majority of the missing men are out of the
work force for months or years at a time rather than drifting in and
out of jobs. There appears to have been no rise since the 1960's in
the percentage of men out of work for short periods, according to
research by Chinhui Juhn, a University of Houston professor, and other
economists.
Mr. Beggerow will not take a lesser job, he says, because of his bitter
memories of earlier years at Northwestern Wire, particularly the
1980's, when the industry was in turmoil. A powerful man, over 6 feet
and 200 pounds, he worked then as a warehouseman.
What got to him was not the work. It was the frequent furloughs, the
uncertainty whether he would be recalled, the mandatory overtime and
50-hour weeks often imposed when he did return, the schedules that
forced him to work every holiday except Christmas, and then, as rising
seniority finally gave him some protection, a six-month strike in 1983
followed by a wage cut. His pay shrank to $13 an hour from $17, a loss
he did not fully recover until those last three years.
"I was always thinking if there was some way I could get out of this,
do something else," Mr. Beggerow said. "What made me so upset was
the insecurity of it all and the humiliation. I don't want to take a
job that would put me through that again."
Shortly after Northwestern closed, Mr. Beggerow married. It was his
third marriage, and also Cathleen's third. He has one adult child by
the first wife; Cathleen has no children. For six months they lived on
his $12,000 from a shrunken pension and her $28,000 as a factory worker
- until severe injuries in an auto accident five months after their
wedding forced her out of that job. She eventually qualified for
$12,000 a year in disability insurance.
Their two incomes are not enough to cover expenses, which bothers Mrs.
Beggerow, although not enough to badger her husband to take a job, any
job. She respects him too much for that, she says.
Instead, she finds ways to make money herself, in activities she
enjoys. She is taking in work as a seamstress, baking pastries for
parties and selling merchandise for others on eBay, collecting a fee.
Still, she says, she hopes to land a part-time clerical job. "The
comfort of a paycheck every week would take a load off my mind," she
said.
While she is tolerant of her husband's reluctance to work, respecting
his current pursuits, she is not above looking for a job he would
consider suitable. "I look at the employment ads every day,'' she
said, "and every so often I find one that I think might be right up
his alley."
Less Concern About the Future
Recently there was an opening for an editor-writer at a small travel
magazine published in a nearby town. "I applied," Mr. Beggerow
said, "but the publisher did not seem to want someone my age."
Meanwhile the Beggerows' savings are shrinking. This year, for the
first time, they have drawn down so much from their 401(k)'s they
have been forced to pay early-withdrawal penalties. But Mr. Beggerow
resists being stampeded.
"The future is always a concern, but I no longer allow myself to
dwell on it," he said, waving aside, in his new and precarious life,
the preparations for retirement and old age that were a feature of his
30 years as a steelworker.
"When you are in the mode of having money coming in," he explained,
"naturally you think about planning and saving. And then when you
don't have the money coming in, you think less about the future, at
least money-wise. It is still a concern, but not a concern that keeps
me up at night, not in this life that I am now leading."
Men like Mr. Beggerow, neither working nor looking for a job, also have
become more common in the popular culture, making the phenomenon more
acceptable. On the television show "Seinfeld," Cosmo Kramer, who
did not work, and George Costanza, who regularly lost jobs, were
beloved figures. Personal-finance magazines whose circulations have
grown rapidly over the last 25 years also encourage not working - by
telling readers how to afford retirement at 50 and by painting not
working as the good life, which it apparently is for a small number of
wealthy men. About 8 percent of non-working men between 30 and 54 lived
in households that had more than $100,000 of income in 2004.
"Men don't feel a need to be in a career, not as much as they once
did," said Ruth Milkman, a sociologist at the University of
California at Los Angeles. "Nor do men have the incentive they once
had to pursue a career, not when employers are no longer committed to
them."
Mr. Priga, the former Xerox engineer who lives in Los Angeles, has been
wandering in this latter Diaspora. He is a tall, thin man with a
perpetually dour expression. His dress - old jeans and a faded khaki
shirt - seemed out of place in the upscale Beverly Hills restaurant
where he was interviewed for this article. But his education and skill
were not out of place.
Mr. Priga is an electrical engineer skilled in computer technology, and
much involved, as he tells the story, in writing early versions of
Internet and e-mail software for banks and other companies. A divorce
in 1996 left him with custody of his three children. One of them had
behavioral problems and to care for the boy he dropped out of steady
work for a while, mortgaging his house to raise money and designing Web
sites as a freelancer.
He re-entered the work force in 2000, joining Xerox at just over
$100,000 a year as a systems designer for a new project, which did not
last. In the aftermath of the dot-com bust, Xerox downsized and Mr.
Priga was let go in January 2003.
>From Prison to Joblessness
"I've been through a lot of layoffs over the years, and there is a
certain procedure you follow," he said. "You contact the
headhunters. You go looking for other work. You do all of that, and
this time around it didn't work."
So he went back to designing Web sites as a freelancer, postponing the
purchase of health insurance. No work has come his way since March, and
even if people had hired him to design Web sites for them, Mr. Priga
would not consider that real employment.
His father is his standard. At Mr. Priga's age, 54, "my father was
with Rockwell International designing the fiber optic backbone for U.S.
Navy ships," he said. "He got a regular paycheck. He had retirement
benefits, medical benefits, all of that. I'm at that age and I
don't see that as even possible. I've kind of written off the idea
completely. I'm more like a casual laborer."
The Bureau of Labor Statistics determines who is working through a
monthly survey of 65,000 representative households. People are asked if
they did any work for pay in the week before the survey, including
self-employment. For Mr. Beggerow and Mr. Priga, the answer has been
no.
The same goes for Rodney Bly, a 41-year-old Philadelphia man struggling
with a prison record, although he has had income - from off-the-books
work that he refuses to think of as employment.
Mr. Bly, a lanky, neatly dressed six-footer, was in and out of jail,
mostly on drug convictions, from 1996 until 2003, but has been clean
since then, he said in an interview last month. He has even been a
leader of an Alcoholics Anonymous-style group of former addicts who
meet regularly and do their best to stay off drugs and out of jail.
Mr. Bly has been living in a recovery shelter for addicts and shows up
occasionally for meals at St. Francis Inn, a soup kitchen and health
clinic in a poor North Philadelphia neighborhood that tries to help
ex-convicts get work and keep it.
He has worked pretty regularly, distributing flyers. But that brings
him only $270 a week, most of which goes to the shelter for rent,
utilities and food. More to the point, the work is off the books, which
makes Mr. Bly invisible in the national statistics as a member of the
work force.
Still, he has a girlfriend, reports Karen Pushaw, a staff member at St.
Francis, "and that grounds him, keeps him looking for legitimate
work."
Ms. Pushaw tries to help. At her encouragement, he applied for 25 jobs
this spring but received no offers, not even an interview. The obstacle
is two felony convictions, one for car theft, the other for three
instances of drug possession.
"Because of the two felonies, I can't get a job as a security guard
or a sales person or a short-order cook," Mr. Bly said. "I can be a
pot washer or a dish washer, but I can't get a job that pays more
than $8 an hour, not a legitimate one. I'm excluded."
Amanda Cox contributed reporting for this article from New York.