Robert: 7 million American men are outside the labor force.
It's a problem we have to address.
So, it used to be that virtually all men between 25 and 55 worked.
But now we're down to about 88%, which means 7 million American men are outside of the
labor force.
Which made me think, what if we got those men back into work.
How would we do it?
Harry: So, the question is, what causes so many men, especially less educated men to drop
out of the workforce?
Probably the biggest factor is that a generation or two ago, these men faced good paying manufacturing
jobs, but most of those jobs have disappeared, and if they remain, they pay much less than
they used to.
They are either gonna find low-wage jobs available, but very unattractive, or the jobs themselves
won't be available because they're living in depressed communities where so much of
the employment has disappeared.
A lot of these men are now on some kind of public benefit program.
Now, these programs do a lot of good, but the downside of these programs is that they
can discourage work effort.
In addition, a large fraction of them have opioid dependencies.
A lot of them will not be able to pass a drug test to be able to take a job.
There is a quite large population of men with criminal records, employers are very reluctant
to hire these men.
And on top of that, a lot of these men have children of whom they don't have custody.
A lot of these men fall behind in their child support payments.
Once they are in arrears, the tax rates on their earnings are very high and they have
strong incentives to disappear from the formal labor market.
They might work off books for cash.
Brent: It is critical from the standpoint of construction, manufacturing, other heavy industries,
that we American workers who are sitting on the sidelines back into gainful employment.
We need hundreds of thousands of new construction workers to address a housing shortage.
Where are we going to get those workers?
If you talk to those who know the construction sector, they will tell you we are already
using every available worker.
So it's one thing to say to men, "You need to go back to work."
But then you have to actually create jobs for them to go to.
Harry: Men, who have only a high school diploma or even less than that, simply don't have
the skills that employers value.
We wanna be improving the skills that these men bring to the labor market, and there's
a few different ways of doing that.
One answer is what we call sector based training.
Industry representatives come together with community colleges to create training programs
and curricula, to train workers for those jobs that are in fact, available.
The other approach that we have a lot of confidence in is apprenticeship.
In these cases, they're being paid while they're training, and they can see the direct relevance
of the training to the work.
And employers like it too because you're training the worker exactly for the skills that the
employer needs.
For those who can't find jobs, we favor some expansion of tax credits paid to the workers
to make those jobs more attractive.
The best example we have of that is something called the Earned Income Tax Credit.
Robert: One other way to increase labor force participation among men is to help those who
are non-custodial parents, both work and pay child support, by supplementing their wages
with an Earned Income Tax Credit.
It rewards them for working and supporting their families.
Raising men's skills is not the only issue we face.
We also have to address public assistance programs that encourage men to stay out of
the labor force and not work.
And the way we do that is, we make those programs say to their applicants for them, "How can
we help you get a job?"
One of those programs is the food stamp program, which does a lot in America, reduce hunger
and lower poverty.
But it also has an increasing number of adults who are receiving food stamps and are reporting
no earnings.
And they're not disabled, and they're not elderly, and they're not children.
They're able-bodied adults who could be in the workforce and aren't.
In order to make these assistance programs more effective at moving people into work,
there has to be an understanding between the agency and the recipient, that the recipient
needs to do something to advance their economic situation.
They need to move toward work.
And if they don't, there have to be consequences.
Brent: One project that's going on right now in Baltimore, Maryland is the redevelopment
of Port Covington neighborhood.
The city of Baltimore is putting in $535 million worth of tax subsidies.
A development group is matching those funds.
But in order to get the tax subsidies, the developers have committed that 30% of the
new jobs created will go to residents of the City of Baltimore.
Some of those jobs need to be reserved for people who are currently out of the workforce.
The reality of our labor market is that, over the last 40 or 50 years, we've seen a dramatic
shift, where jobs involving heavy industry work have been off-shored.
We've experienced deindustrialization, and the president made a commitment during his
campaign to bring some of those jobs back.
Members of the House, and Senate, and the president ought to consider the creation of
a requirement for community benefit agreements.
That entities receiving federal tax subsidies would have to set aside a certain number of
jobs to be created for people who have exhausted their unemployment benefits and present to
the government their plan for bringing these people back into the labor force.
Robert: It's not just the economy that will be strengthened by getting men back into work,
it's the men themselves because when they're working, they're much less likely to be poor,
they're much less likely to be unhealthy, and they're much more likely to be strong
providers for their families and their children.
A good way to illustrate the inadequacy of our public assistance programs is when I went
out and talked to people who are receiving benefits.
I talked to a man who said, "That program is very good at getting me an EBT card, but
it does nothing to get me a job."