Behind much of the MAGA economic agenda lies a concern with restoring manly jobs. Coal miners want to mine! says Donald Trump. “They’re good strong guys,” he says. “That’s what they want to do. They love to dig coal, that’s what they want to do. They don’t want to do gidgets and widgets and wadgets. They don’t want to build cell phones with their hands, their big, strong hands.”
Back during the campaign, J.D. Vance argued that the U.S. needed to crack down on illegal immigration so that businesses would have to pay high wages and hire the seven million prime-age American men who’ve dropped out of the labor force. Some of those men, he acknowledged, might be “struggling with addiction,” but employers shouldn’t give up on their fellow citizens.
I’m sympathetic with the critiques of researchers like Richard Reeves, who warn that boys and men are, at least in some contexts, being marginalized. It’s foolish and unjust to marginalize half the human race, whichever half you pick.
That said, there is a lot wrong with the MAGA story about manly jobs, starting with the desirability of mining coal. Although conditions have improved over time, coal mining is a terrible job. As George Orwell wrote,
More than anyone else, perhaps, the miner can stand as the type of the manual worker, not only because his work is so exaggeratedly awful, but also because it is so vitally necessary and yet so remote from our experience, so invisible, as it were, that we are capable of forgetting it as we forget the blood in our veins. In a way it is even humiliating to watch coal-miners working. It raises in you a momentary doubt about your own status as an ‘intellectual’ and a superior person generally. For it is brought home to you, at least while you are watching, that it is only because miners sweat their guts out that superior persons can remain superior. You and I and the editor of the Times Lit. Supp., and the poets and the Archbishop of Canterbury and Comrade X, author of Marxism for Infants — all of us really owe the comparative decency of our lives to poor drudges underground, blackened to the eyes, with their throats full of coal dust, driving their shovels forward with arms and belly muscles of steel.
In the 1980s, it was common to read of Japanese workers who had begun to shun 3K jobs “kitanai, kiken, kitsui (respectively 汚い “dirty”, 危険 “dangerous”, きつい “demanding”).” The phenomenon was not unique to Japan. Given a choice, most people—including most men—prefer clean, safe, enjoyable work. An X-ray technician, phlebotomist, or smart phone salesman is not emasculated because he doesn’t need an immediate shower when he comes home from work.
What has actually happened is not that men can’t find employment. It’s that today’s well-paid “masculine” jobs generally require more self-discipline than the regimentation of a factory. A construction site has bosses but you don’t work at machine pace. The same is true of a warehouse or hospital. Autonomy has increased but, with it, so has the need for continuous self-control, even in environments where workers and results are strictly monitored.
Higher pay also tends to come along with high levels of equipment (aka capital) rather than labor-intensive work. A real Amazon warehouse doesn’t look like ChatGPT’s rendition above. It looks like more like this photo, taken during the Christmas rush in 2016, when this Amazon warehouse in Wales had more than the usual number of workers:
Those much-lamented factory jobs bring to mind two stories from my past. The first was my ninth grade social studies teacher, a Michigan native who wound up in Greenville because he went to Bob Jones University, recounting tales of his summers working on auto assembly lines. This was in the 1970s, when Detroit was still fat and complacent. The work was so mindlessly boring, he said, that the workers would occasionally deliberately wreck a partially assembled car for fun.
The second was much later, back in 2005 when I was researching this article on a furniture company in Dallas. The factory was as clean and pleasant as a factory can be, the pay was good for the area, and the work, while somewhat repetitive, was close enough to craftsmanship to seem satisfying. Almost all of the workers were immigrants, and the company was eager to hire their U.S.-born children. But the kids weren’t interested, and not only because some were upwardly mobile. They would rather take jobs at Target, an executive told me, where the pay was lower but work was less structured and more sociable.
Sometimes factory evolution has its own labor-market surprises. Take the flat-pack furniture pioneered by IKEA. It reduces shipping costs, allows high levels of factory automation, and complements computer-aided design tools. Check out this video of a Polish flat-pack furniture factory.
It also creates masculine jobs outside the factory, as I was reminded yesterday when I hired a guy on Taskrabbit to assemble a couple of pieces of furniture for me. Owned by IKEA since 2017, Taskrabbit makes flat-pack furniture accessible to people who are spatially challenged or short on time and patience. It takes advantage of specialization. But to succeed as a gig worker you need to be diligent, efficient, and reliable. Vance’s seven million male labor force dropouts either wouldn’t make it as “taskers” or simply prefer their nonwork alternatives.
All of this is a long setup to the following article from my archives. Published in 2017, it got almost no attention at the time, even though it made what I think is a significant point. An AI-assisted check to update the statistics confirms that the trend is still in full force and has, if anything, accelerated. Men are winning! Woman are losing! Of course, it’s just one (very large) sector of the economy..
Originally published on Bloomberg April 19, 2017
From 19th-century shop girls to 20th-century buyers, modern retailing has been a female-friendly work environment. Just look at the photos today’s department stores use to illustrate their commitments to diversity. Women typically outnumber men at least two-to-one, a ratio that reflects reality. At Nordstrom, for example, 70 percent of all employees and 69 percent of managers are women.
So the “retail apocalypse” means fewer jobs for women. Retail trade employment barely budged over the past year, with an increase of less than 0.4 percent, or about 58,000 jobs, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. For general merchandise retailers, where women predominate, employment fell by about 50,000 jobs.
The collapse of traditional retailing reverses a much-heralded trend: Jobs that involve working with things are disappearing, while those that demand a winning personality —celebrated as “emotional intelligence”—are growing. Men lose while women win, especially at the bottom of the educational and income ladder.
“The labor market continues to shift away from traditionally male jobs toward traditionally female jobs,” Jed Kolko, the chief economist for job site Indeed, told USA Today last week. That’s a particular problem for less-educated men, half of whom are in occupations where at least four-fifths of the workers are male, compared to 20 percent of men with bachelor’s degrees. “Fast-growing male jobs that require lots of education don’t really help men without a college degree who have been in traditionally male jobs and for whom work is part of male identity,” Kolko wrote in a blog post.
That’s true but incomplete. Reports on economic changes tend to reflect two biases. They emphasize losers over winners, the seen over the unseen. And they reflect the personal and professional values of the educated, articulate people doing the reporting.
Contrary to the feminine triumphalism that declares traditionally male skills obsolete, the economy is full of surprises and cross-currents. In the retailing world, demand for people-pleasing sales clerks is down. Even shoppers who buy in person prefer to do their own research online and get in and out quickly, rather than deal with solicitous sales people.
Meanwhile, demand for merchandise-moving warehouse workers and, at least until self-driving trucks and drones show up, delivery drivers is rising. That’s good news for less-educated men.
In the past year, the number of Americans working transportation and warehouse jobs rose by 47,000, or 5.2 percent, to 945,000, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. For production and nonsupervisory employees, the increase was even sharper, 6.4 percent. Men hold more than three-quarters of all transportation and warehouse jobs.
Like capital-intensive factories, warehouses with robot assistants make workers more productive and hence more valuable. In Amazon’s cutting-edge facilities, they complement human skills. “We like to think of it as a symphony of software, machine learning, computer algorithms, and people,” a spokeswoman told MIT Technology Review.
Wages, while low, are rising as retailers expand online offerings. Fulfillment centers tend to cluster in places like northeastern Kentucky, near Cincinnati, and the Inland Empire east of Los Angeles. So they draw from the same talent pool. And competition for workers is getting fierce.
Logistics staffing firm ProLogistix reports that starting pay is up 6 percent over last year. Fulfillment company Radial similarly boosted wages in December. “Last year was really the tipping point for us,” Robyn Jordan, senior director of human resources for Radial’s global operations, told The Wall Street Journal.
That tipping point is otherwise known as the retail meltdown.
It’s easy to see empty storefronts and dying malls. But out of sight warehouses are buzzing with orders and the workers who fill them. Delivery services like UPS and FedEx are expanding their facilities, creating jobs not only for their own employees but for construction crews. Retail evolution is a change, not a disaster. And it’s too soon to write regular guys out of the economic future.
I’ll be in London May 2-7 and open to meetings or meetups. Please email me if you’re interested, vp@vpostrel.com. (Please write a separate email rather than replying to this post. Otherwise your note might get lost in the shuffle, as all replies to an emailed post come in one long thread.)
A roundtable on American dynamism from Profectus magazine. (I was invited to participate but an email mixup interfered.)
Interesting interview with Ross Douthat in The New Left Review. At one point he refers to “my idiosyncratic conservative, dynamist and Catholic views.” I didn’t see that dynamist coming.
The Trump administration has it in for the South Carolina manufacturing boom. As long as it’s guaranteed MAGA country, the state won’t count for much in national politics. BMW “is also America’s top auto exporter, shipping $10.1 billion worth of sports-utility vehicles all over the world from its South Carolina plant last year, according to Commerce Department data—more than any other automaker.”
The Vesuvius Challenge is rapidly making progress toward its goal of scanning all 300 known scrolls buried at Herculaneum. Here’s a report and explanation.
Enjoyable WSJ business piece on how Chili’s is stealing customers from fast food. It reminded me of the “food is photogenic” point in this column I wrote in 2017.
considers whether America has rejected exceptionalism. There’s a deeper question here of the difference between skepticism and nihilism.
I’m happy to see that Dean Ball, my favorite writer on AI issues, is now the Senior Policy Advisor for AI and Emerging Technology at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. He is no longer posting on Substack but I highly recommend his archives. Here’s my podcast interview of Dean.
A disturbing example of deplatforming by AI from
.
Contrary to the impression left by some recent pro-abundance works. Jane Jacobs was not for stasis and preservation,
reminds readers in a thoughtful post about urban dynamism. “She advocated for market urbanism and organic development.” I learned a surprising amount about Jacobs when I reviewed a book about William Whyte, who made her famous. “She and Whyte were kindred souls: observant connoisseurs of the spontaneous orders of city life,” I wrote.
How a 1987 law, passed over Ronald Reagan’s veto, invited the Trump administration to boss around universities.
Need a business credit card? I use and recommend the Chase Ink card. Use this link to apply and I’ll get some bonus points.
I plan to start making more videos this summer. In the meantime, enjoy this one from my archives. I wouldn’t call Trump a Fascist, but he and Mussolini do share some body language and an irrational fondness for autarchia.
