Today’s American men are working less during their prime years than they did in the 1960s, with the biggest drop in employment among less-educated men.
In 1969, 96% of men between the ages of 25 and 54 participated in the labor force. By 2015, that rate had fallen to under 89%.
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Nonworkers were more likely to be black. About one-third of nonworkers were black.
While the biggest employment drop is among less-educated men, the troubling trend now seems to be occurring among women as well. Female employment rates rose beginning in the late 1960s, but then started dropping.
“Since about 2000, you’re also starting to see declines in participation of prime-age women, especially less educated women,” says Katharine G. Abraham, author of the study and a professor of economics and survey methodology at the University of Maryland. “So you’re kind of seeing some of the same things that have been happening for a longer time to men, also beginning to happen to women.”
A changing labor market, particularly the steep decline of manufacturing jobs in the United States, has hit this group of workers particularly hard.
“If you’re a less-educated worker, it used to be that you could get a good job. Maybe you’d work in manufacturing, maybe you’d work in construction. You could have a good job without necessarily having a college education. But the labor markets really changed,” says Abraham. “For a lot of these less-educated men and, women, both of their opportunities in the labor market are less good. They can’t expect to earn the same kind of living that their fathers might have.”
Experts suggest that the rise in incarceration, and the growth in the number of people with prison records, negatively contribute to the ability of some of these non-working men to get a job.
“People who did not work in the prior year were more likely to be interviewed while they were in prison,” Rothstein says. “Twenty-four percent of the people in group one [men born between 1960 to 1964], almost one-in-four, didn’t work because they were in prison.”
Researchers have also studied the possible impact of the opioid epidemic on labor force participation. More than 130 people in the United States die each day after abusing opioids.