Stagnating Labor Participation by American Males without a College Education — Soft Skills, Not Strong Arms
Two articles caught my attention recently. The first, “Against Happiness” (The Economist, September 24, 2016) describes how businesses seek to mandate happy attitudes and smiles for all of their workers. It skewers the practice as an invasion workers’ rights:
“The more employees are obliged to fix their faces with a rictus smile or express joy at a customer’s choice of shoes, the more likely they are to suffer problems of burnout. And the contradiction between companies demanding more displays of contentment from workers, even as they put them on miserably short-term contracts and turn them into self-employed “partners”, is becoming more stark.
But the biggest problem with the cult of happiness is that it is an unacceptable invasion of individual liberty. Many companies are already overstepping the mark. A large American health-care provider, Ochsner Health System, introduced a rule that workers must make eye contact and smile whenever they walk within ten feet of another person in the hospital. Pret A Manger sends in mystery shoppers to visit every outlet regularly to see if they are greeted with the requisite degree of joy. Pass the test and the entire staff gets a bonus — a powerful incentive for workers to turn themselves into happiness police. Companies have a right to ask their employees to be polite when they deal with members of the public. They do not have a right to try to regulate their workers’ psychological states and turn happiness into an instrument of corporate control.”
The second article was a column by George F. Will reprinted from the Washington Post in my local paper with the headline “Quiet Catastrophe — millions of men idle, by choice.” (Star Tribune, October 7, 2016.). Will, in turn, was reacting to a new book called “Men Without Work: America’s Invisible Crisis” by Nicholas Eberstadt documenting the fact that a smaller percentage of men ages 25 to 54 are participating in the American workforce than at any time since 1940. Most American men who are unemployed by choice or otherwise lack a college education. These men make up the core of the Donald Trump voting bloc and represent a present-day tragedy.
One must wonder if the soft skills, including mandatory smiles, required by today’s jobs play a role the statistics and vast levels of discontent. For hundreds of years, men could make an honest living with hard labor, physical strength and a decent work ethic, which essentially meant showing up most days. If a worker got fired for missing too many days, he could usually find a new physical labor job somewhere else. Automation (and to some extent globalization) means those jobs are gone. Today, unskilled men who are physically able, and mentally willing to “work” will not be able to raise a family performing menial labor. Service positions, which require the ability to interact with the public and smile all day every day in some ways are more difficult than old fashioned physical labor. More importantly, they sap one’s dignity, and dignity is what Trump voters seek to regain.
