What ever happened to the American work ethic?

English: Two hobos walking along railroad tracks, after being put off a train. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Report reveals 38% of adult Americans aren't even trying to find work:
http://personalliberty.com/mass-flight-u-s-labor-force-drives-april-unemployment/

Here's what I wrote with incredulity back in October:

Why 36 Percent of All American Adults Aren’t Working and Aren’t Looking for Work

          An August broadcast on National Public Radio claimed, “The unemployment rate only includes people who don’t have jobs and are looking for work.  A much larger swath of people --- about 36 percent of U.S. adults --- don’t have jobs and aren’t looking for work at all.”  This remarkable claim was backed up by four big reasons:

1. Baby Boomers are retiring:  Figures I was able to find confirm this assertion to a degree, but not entirely.  One such source says that 52 percent of the earliest boomers are now fully retired.  On the other hand, 21 percent --- including this author --- are still working full-time.  Nearly a third say they’ll be retiring later than they once thought.  About a third of this third say they need their salaries while another third report enjoying their work.  (In case you are curious, I fall into both of those categories.)  The average retirement age of those who have left our working ranks was 59.5, suggesting that those boomers who did the best retired first.  Only one percent of us boomers are looking for work, according to this source.  [Tammy Flanagan, “How Baby Boomers Are Retiring,” Government Executive, August 23, 2013, accessed at http://www.govexec.com/pay-benefits/retirement-planning/2013/08/how-baby-boomers-are-retiring/69200/]
2. More Americans are going to college:  “College enrollment is up…,” said NPR.  That statement is subject to many qualifications. Looking back to last spring, the National Student Clearinghouse reported, “In the current term (spring 2013), enrollments have decreased, compared to the previous spring, in every sector except four-year private nonprofits, with the largest decreases taking place among four-year for-profits (-8.7 percent) and two-year publics (-3.6 percent).”  [http://research.studentclearinghouse.org/files/TermEnrollmentReport-Spring2013.pdf] 

      According to the Census Bureau, the decline began a year ago. “According to U.S. Census Bureau statistics released today (Sept. 3, 2013), college enrollment in fall 2012 plunged by half a million (467,000) from one year earlier. This decline, which includes both graduate and undergraduate enrollment, follows a period of substantial growth — 3.2 million — between 2006 and 2011.  This decline in college enrollment was driven by older students — that is, those 25 and older. Their enrollment fell by 419,000, while the enrollment of younger students declined by 48,000.” 

        However, this release adds, “Hispanics didn't follow the trend, as the number enrolled in college grew by 447,000 from 2011 to 2012. Meanwhile, non-Hispanic white enrollment declined by 1.1 million and black enrollment by 108,000. From 2006 to 2012, the percentage of all college students who were Hispanic rose from 11 percent to 17 percent. The percentage who were black also rose (from 14 percent to 15 percent), but the percent of non-Hispanic white students declined from 67 percent to 58 percent.”  [http://www.census.gov/newsroom/releases/archives/education/cb13-153.html]

        The New York Times reported this summer, “College enrollment fell 2 percent in 2012-13, the first significant decline since the 1990s, but nearly all of that drop hit for-profit and community colleges; now, signs point to 2013-14 being the year when traditional four-year, nonprofit colleges begin a contraction that will last for several years. The college-age population is dropping after more than a decade of sharp growth, and many adults who opted out of a forbidding job market and went back to school during the recession have been drawn back to work by the economic recovery.”  [Richard Perez-Pena, “College Enrollment Falls as Economy Recovers,” New York Times, July 25, 2013, accessed at http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/26/education/in-a-recovering-economy-a-decline-in-college-enrollment.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0]

        Anecdotally, I can confirm that in my neck of the woods, i.e., the Northeast, “traditional four-year, nonprofit colleges” did indeed experience enrollment declinations.  Causes include a decline in high school graduation rates in our region, as well as high tuition rates.  Parents and students apparently have become more savvy consumers of higher education, bargaining hard with financial-aid officers and resisting the temptation to add to the trillion-dollar student-loan burden currently carried by college alumni.  Another factor is the effort of many public universities to expand their enrollments, as state aid continues to decline in many jurisdictions.

         An example of this latter trend is New Jersey’s Rutgers University, which announced last January, “Rutgers University announced that it has signed a seven-year deal with Pearson eCollege to increase the school’s online education options. According to David Feingold, senior vice president of lifelong learning and strategic growth, the university is trying to make ‘a really major thrust,’ looking to add tens of thousands of virtual students by 2020. Rutgers, which first introduced online learning in 1999, hopes this partnership will further open the school to national and international students seeking both online courses and degrees.”

         “We’ve been growing our online enrollment between 20 (percent) and 25 percent per year, and we’re up to 15,000 enrollments this year, but we’ve done it in a bootstrap fashion,” said Feingold. “The decision to do a public-private partnership was really driven by the knowledge that if we wanted to get our online programs to scale globally and make investments to get to high quality instruction, we needed a partner.” [http://www.onlinedegrees.com/degree360/e-learning-news/rutgers-signs-deal-with-pearson-ecollege-to-expand-online-offerings.html]

          Bottom line:  NPR’s assertion is true for some sectors of the higher-ed industry in some geographic regions, and not true for others.  No general statement can be applied to the U.S. as a whole.

3. Some are staying home with their kids:  Some evidence supports this assertion.  MSN Money reported in August that the number of stay-at-home dads doubled to 176,000 between 2000 and 2010.  [http://money.msn.com/family-money/benefits-of-a-stay-at-home-parent] 
4. They can’t find a job:  Last, but hardly least, are those Americans who just can’t find work.  Some aspects of this issue are

·     A mismatch between available jobs and the skill sets of the unemployed.  According to Rene Bryce Laporte, former program manager for Skills for America’s Future, “The precise number of jobs that remain unfilled is elusive, but we know that the number is high. Now, jobs sometimes go unfilled because of natural fluctuation in the workplace--somebody leaves a job and it stays open for a few months. There are some observers who say that the idea of a skills gap is overstated, that vacancies persist because employers can't find people with the skills they need at the rate they're willing to pay. But it is true that employers complain they have a hard time finding workers with the skills they need.” [http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/08/why-jobs-go-unfilled-even-in-times-of-high-unemployment/278801/]

·     The American economy, post-Great Recession, may not be producing enough jobs to go around.  Writes one pundit, “[I]n this economic environment, a single nationwide hiring event conducted by McDonalds resulted in a million job applications, and only a small percentage of those applicants were actually hired.  Our economy simply does not produce enough jobs for everyone anymore, and the percentage of ‘good jobs’ continues to decline.  That means that it is getting really hard to find a job that will enable you to support a family, and a lot of people end up doing jobs that they are massively overqualified for.” [Tyler Durden, “i5 Signs That the Quality of Jobs in America Is Fading Fast,” Zero Hedge, July 7, 2013, accessed at http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-07-07/15-signs-quality-jobs-america-fading-fast]

·     Many jobs that went away during the Great Recession are never coming back.  Bureau of Labor Statistics data, as analyzed by USA Today, revealed a decade-long decline  of 54% in word processing and typing jobs; a comparable 59% declination in “computer operator’ positions; and, an erosion of 60% for advertising and promotion managers.  [Hess & Frohlich, “Top 10 disappearing jobs in the USA,” USA Today, Aug. 30, 2013, accessed at http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2013/08/30/disappearing-jobs-in-usa/2750105/]

·     The Bureau of Labor Statistics also reported that millions of Americans have either given up on ever finding work or are firmly stuck in low-wage, low-to-no benefits positions.  Concerning those who have more or less given up, “Among the marginally attached, there were 866,000 discouraged workers in August, essentially unchanged from a year earlier.”  Regarding part-timers, “The number of persons employed part time for economic reasons (sometimes referred to as involuntary part-time workers) declined by 334,000 to 7.9 million in August. These individuals were working part time because their hours had been cut back or because they were unable to find a full-time job.” [http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.htm]

       Author’s comment.  A debate is simmering about whether post-Great Recession America is simply experiencing an economic cycle that’s significant only in the depth of the trough.  Or are we also in the throes of a sea change?  Is technology creating as many new jobs as it’s destroying old, traditional ones, such as the clerical positions noted above?  This writer falls into the ranks of those who believe that a structural change is afoot that will challenge us to find ways of gainfully employing our younger generation. 

         One answer being attempted is a resurgence of the American labor movement.  But unlike a century or so ago, when industrial workers were the targets of organized labor, today it’s service employees in the retail and restaurant arenas.  In August and September, we witnessed a wave of work stoppages aimed at firms like Walmart and McDonald’s, spearheaded by the Service Employees International Union. [See “Fast Food Worker Strikes Expand to South, West Coast,” Huffington Post, Aug. 29, 2013, accessed at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/29/fast-food-worker-strikes-expand_n_3831060.html; Jarrod Shanahan, “Fast Food Workers Fight for $15 an Hour,” Aljazeera America, Aug. 5, 2013, accessed at http://www.vice.com/read/fast-food-workers-fight-for-15hr; Ben Axelson, “Walmart workers strike for higher wage, right to unionize,” Syracuse Post-Standard, Sept. 4, 2013, accessed at http://www.syracuse.com/news/index.ssf/2013/09/walmart_workers_strike_minimum_wage.html]

        Meanwhile, higher education institutions are striving to make their product more relevant and job-related.  However, at least one guru predicts that the industry as a whole is in deep trouble.  Harverd Business School’s Clayton Christensen has said, “I think higher education is just on the edge of the crevasse. Generally, universities are doing very well financially, so they don’t feel from the data that their world is going to collapse. But I think even five years from now these enterprises are going to be in real trouble."  Echoing what we saw happening at Rutgers, above, he added, “"Some will survive. Most will evolve hybrid models, in which universities license some courses from an online provider like Coursera but then provide more-specialized courses in person. Hybrids are actually a principle regardless of industry. If you want to use a new technology in a mainstream existing market, it has to be a hybrid."

 [http://www.businessinsider.com/clay-christensen-higher-education-on-the-edge-2013-2#ixzz2fdAGqLJ6]  Elsewhere, Christensen has predicted that in as little as 15 years, fully 50% of all colleges and universities might be in bankruptcy, regardless of the sector, i.e., public, nonprofit, or for-profit.

           Earlier this year, we reported a rise in apprenticeship programs.  [See your January 2013 C&B Law Bulletin.]  Such schemes, common and highly successful in Germany, may help address the mismatch between skills and open jobs, mentioned above.

           We live in interesting, some might say dangerous, times, when no profession or occupation or industry can feel secure.  Whether partial answers lie in union organizing, or apprenticeships, or hybrid college educations, hard times are not all behind us.  The NPR story, which inspired this article, hit that nail squarely on the head.