America’s Workforce Is Collapsing—Here’s Why | CLIP | Crossroads

Good evening and welcome to Crossroads. America is facing a crisis. Well, actually we're facing a whole bunch of them. But today we're talking about one in particular, the work crisis. Hear me out. There's a real problem right now that people just plain old don't feel like working, bless their hearts. But there's actually more to it than is often being discussed. Men are checking out of society. Senator Marco Rubio just released a report on the state of the working and non-working men. And it looks into the phenomena that about seven million young men of good health and in the prime of their lives are just choosing to not work. The longer they stay like this, the harder it is to come back into the workforce. And many others who are employed are underemployed and also underpaid. And there's not really a whole lot of hope they're ever going to break out of poverty. It cites a lot of problems behind this. In fact, Senator Marco Rubio writes, several long-term trends stand out. Deindustrialization of sending our factories overseas, borders, open borders, changes in education, corrosive welfare programs, and revolutionary changes in American agriculture and technology. Good old government intervention. Of course, if you were to watch President Biden or the White House press briefings, you'd be hearing a very different story. The Biden administration has been touting the success of Bidenomics. The Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, started calling my plan not initially as a compliment, Bidenomics. But guess what, folks? They're talking about it differently now. It's working. Now under this Bidenomics, they're claiming unemployment is going down. In fact, they say the quality of life is just fine and dandy. So a few weeks into this new Bidenomics push, how do you rate how you guys are doing? So look, the polls don't tell the whole story. They don't tell the full story and we understand that. The data shows the combination of unemployment and inflation is in near historic lows. That's what we have seen. Consumer confidence is increasing and also wages are rising. That's what certainly the data is showing. Interesting, but look, it's actually not fooling anyone, not even on the left side of the media. In fact, the government has been accused of doctoring the numbers in unemployment a couple years running now. Even the leftist media, as I mentioned, they're noting the problem. Americans are less motivated to work and even when they are working, they seem less engaged. Productivity is going down. You know, in other words, this isn't just a problem of there not being enough jobs. There's something deeper going on. Now, look, if you were to ask me, the real cause of the problem is pretty simple. I'd say there are two sides to it. On one, there's the reality that hard work just doesn't pay like it used to. It's the sentiment that Oliver Anthony raised in his viral song, Richmond, North Richmond, that while some people are working themselves half to death and are still barely getting by, other people are sitting at home comfortably on welfare. And also a lot of men don't have the same ambition they used to. You know, the responsibility to family, the desire to impress a girl, get married and have kids. For a lot of them, it feels like some far off dream. You know, it's the rise of the so-called incels. It's the quiet crisis of depression, drug abuse and effeminate lifestyles. And other people just never had a good mentor there to teach them. They may want to work, they may want to improve themselves, but they don't know how. And they're stuck in a rut. They've given up hope and they really have no chance of getting out, it seems. It's the crisis of hopelessness. And look, as a society, we're facing some real problems with this. Key jobs that are needed to keep an advanced society like ours running, they're not being filled. Mike Rowe hosted dirty jobs and has actually been warning about this for a good while now. It's not just a problem of young men not wanting to work or to push themselves. It's also a problem of the type of work people are choosing to do or not do. It's the unglamorous jobs getting left behind. It's the jobs that society these days tends to look down on. But these are the jobs that keep a modern society functioning. And once those skills are no longer passed down, not only do those jobs start going away, but so too will the industries and the many nice things we have supported by those jobs. They're going to go away, too. Mike Rowe said in an interview with Forbes in 2018 that in a very general way, our society has fallen out of love with the skilled trades. Rowe blames this partly on the allure of college, funny enough. Young people are getting useless degrees and putting themselves in massive debt while they're doing it. And they forget that there are very good paying jobs. You do not need a college degree to get. We've told an entire generation that the best path for the most people is the most expensive path. And we've also promoted college not on its merits, but at the expense of every other kind of degree or any kind of certification training. If you don't go over here, you're going to wind up turning a wrench with some sort of vocational consolation prize. That's interesting. In 2018, society started to have a discussion on the work crisis and, you know, the crisis of young men in particular. But of course, that was 2018. The problem was raised. There was time to fix it. Did it get fixed? Well, no. Actually, it got a whole lot worse. Because what happened around that time? Well, you might remember the COVID-19 pandemic hit. Businesses were closed down. People were locked in their homes. Others just plain old got fired for not going along with the mandates. With the extra boost to unemployment pay, you can make more money not even working than if you had a job, you might remember. And even for those who did have stable jobs, a lot of people worked from home. Things have never fully gone back to normal. And it's looking now that while the virus is endemic, so too is the social impact it had. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce wrote in August this year that we hear every day from our member companies, again, they'd have a lot of companies with them, of every size and industry across nearly every state, they're facing unprecedented challenges trying to find enough workers to fill open jobs. They say right now the latest data shows that we have 9.8 million job openings in the U.S., but only 5.9 million unemployed workers. And even those numbers are a bit doctored. They say the jobs are there, but nobody wants to do them. And even if every position were to be filled, if every single unemployed person in the entire country were to get a job, there would still be around 4 million unfilled positions, at least based on these numbers. And they note another problem is having a cause for this, the pandemic. Again, 120,000 businesses were closed, more than 30 million Americans are put out of work. Yet while things have steadily returned to normal, unemployment has been getting worse. It notes the labor force participation right now, it's only around 62.6 percent. Many people got used to working from home. They don't want to go back to the way things were. And again, it looks like things are not going to go back to normal.