In advance of Labor Day I thought this article in USA Today was interesting, "Women gain as men lose jobs."
According to the article, in June of this year women held 49.83% of jobs in this country and despite the record unemployment their numbers are growing. In fact, women are poised to become the majority of the workforce for the first time in our history in October or November of this year.
The article does a good job of pointing out a few caveats and important tidbits for thought:
(1) The change reflects the growing importance of women as wage earners, but it doesn't show full equality. On average, women work fewer hours than men, hold more part-time jobs and earn 77% of what men make.
(2) Through June, men have lost 74% of the 6.4 million jobs erased since the recession began in December 2007. Men have lost more than 3 million jobs in construction and manufacturing alone.
(3) Strikingly, this also applies to other sectors, such as local government. Of the 14.6 million-person workforce (which includes cities, schools, water authorities and other local jurisdictions) 86,000 men were cut from payrolls during the recession while 167,000 women were added.
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(2) Through June, men have lost 74% of the 6.4 million jobs erased since the recession began in December 2007. Men have lost more than 3 million jobs in construction and manufacturing alone.
Despite this, the National Organization of Women successfully worked to block spending from going towards construction and manufacturing which have been hit hard, and instead insisted that large portions of the money go towards nursing and education, neither of which have been particularly hard hit if at all, solely because more women are in those fields.
Well in all fairness, over-construction was part of what got us into this mess. And the manufacturing sector in this country is a dying horse. How realistic is it to prop up manufacturing when we know damn well we won't be able to compete with the likes of China?
In the meantime nursing projections point to a huge shortage---jobs that cannot be shipped off. Why can't part of the solution be to get more men into nursing and education?
In so far as manufacturing, yes there are fewer people employed in manufacturing now then ten years previous, and yes trade has increased. To gather from this that the US is going to lose all its manufacturing is a bit of an erroneous, if common assumption.
The United States while it has lost manufacturing jobs has made significant gains in manufacturing production, this is largely because we have seen a shift in US manufacturing, as it stands now products which require a high degree of skill, or allow for a high degree of automation are still produced in the US. It has been primarily the labour intensive products that we have lost. Wind turbines, solar panels, gasification units, etc. are all products which require the skill sets common in nations like the US and Canada, and cannot be readily outsourced.
As far as nursing, I'll completely agree that we need more nurses, and we need more men to consider nursing as a career. The issue is that nursing is as you said facing a shortage. This means that they cannot readily, and quickly hire people to work for them. It also suggests that any attempt to simply hire more nurses would only result in inflation (more money but with the same limited pool of nurses). The purpose of a stimulus package is to quickly get people back to work without causing inflation. If you do cause inflation you only make conditions much worse for the unemployed. While the nursing problem is very real it is something to be addressed with consistent long term policies to promote a change years down the road, and cannot be done properly in a stimulus bill.
First of all I never suggested that the US is losing all manufacturing, lol. I meant that the former state of doing business not only contributed to our crisis, but it has been un-competitive for quite some time. Why keep supporting that? Let it die so that we can be competitive in other areas.
You mention that the new era of manufacturing will require highly skilled labor, yet folks balk about increases in education spending, which if done properly (and that's a big if, I'll admit) could contribute to a workforce prepared to learn these new skills.
Wind turbines, solar panels, gasification units, etc. are all products which require the skill sets common in nations like the US and Canada, and cannot be readily outsourced.
Which is exactly what Obama did, didn't he? Is it safe to say that men will be well represented among the ranks of engineers, investors, researchers, manufactures and developers of these projects? Let's look at what Obama signed:
* $11 billion for “smart grid” investments.
* $3.4 billion for carbon capture and sequestration demonstration projects (otherwise known as “clean coal”).
* $2 billion for research into batteries for electric cars.
* $500 million to help workers train for “green jobs.”
* A three-year extension of the “production tax credit” for wind energy (as well as a tax credit extension for biomass, geothermal, landfill gas and some hydropower projects).
* The option, available to many developers, of turning their tax credits into direct cash, with the government underwriting 30 percent of a project’s cost.
Ah yes. The devil's in the details and one could make a strong case that the reason there are more female wage earners in the workforce is because they aren't paid nearly as much as men and companies desperate to cut costs have no reservations hiring women at less pay.
No you really couldn't make a strong case for that.
The employment statistics show that there are particular sectors which are suffering (e.g. manufacturing, construction) and in these sectors the workers who are suffering most are the youngest, lowest paid workers, because they typically need more training and thus represent an investment for the company, or because they lack seniority and are by contract the first to be fired.
There are links to the wage gap, such as considering that while the predominantly female fields pay less, they confer significantly more job security, thus offsetting the lower pay. Or that considering the difficulty trade workers are currently facing and the fact that the stimulus was effectively crippled by the National Organization of Women, they have only made it more difficult to attract more women into those fields. Or a difference in reservation price between men and women leading to higher pay for men, but an increased likelihood of unemployment... There are many things that this can be used to explain about the nature of the wage gap, but to view this as an issue of employers firing men because they're paid more is far too simplistic and dogmatic on many levels.