The Wrong Route to Equality – Men’s Declining Wages

[galileoreloaded]

Awesome article.

http://www.epi.org/publication/wrong-route-equality-mens-declining-wages/

"In the late 1970s, after a long period of holding fairly steady, the gap in wages between men and women began improving. In 1979, the median hourly wage for women was 62.7 percent of the median hourly wage for men; by 2012, it was 82.8 percent. However, a big chunk of that improvement – more than a quarter of it — happened because of men’s wage losses, rather than women’s wage gains."

[Warren Stupidity]

1. Just to be clear.

Nor are men’s losses are due to women’s gains. The forces that were holding back male wage growth were also acting on women’s wages, but the gains made by women over this period in educational attainment, labor force attachment, and occupational upgrading, along with greater legal protections against discriminatory pay, initially compensated for adverse forces. In the last decade, however, women’s wages have also dropped.

[lumberjack_jeff]

2. Yeah thanks, that's what Heidi said.

But it's not true.

The wage losses have been concentrated among men with lower levels of education, because women (who as a group are better educated) are getting the jobs.
/image_preview

http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/22/the-uncomfortable-truth-about-american-wages/?_r=0
http://www.hamiltonproject.org/papers/trends_reduced_earnings_for_men_in_america/


[div class="excerpt" style="background-color:#dcdcdc; padding-bottom:5px; border:1px solid #bfbfbf; border-bottom:none; border-radius:0.4615em 0.4615em 0em 0em; box-shadow:3px 3px 3px #999999;"]The struggles of men[div class="excerpt" style="background-color:#f0f0f0; border:1px solid #bfbfbf; border-top:none; border-radius:0em 0em 0.4615em 0.4615em; box-shadow:3px 3px 3px #999999;"]Because the role of women in the labor force has changed strikingly over the last 40 years, the problem is most evident in trends in male earnings. And, in fact, there has been a lot of talk about the stagnating wages of American male workers. Using conventional methods of analysis, the data show that the median earnings for prime-age (25-64) working men have declined slightly from 1970 to 2010, falling by 4 percent after adjusting for inflation.

This finding of stagnant wages is unsettling, but also quite misleading. For one thing, this statistic includes only men who have jobs. In 1970, 94 percent of prime-age men worked, but by 2010, that number was only 81 percent. The decline in employment has been accompanied by increases in incarceration rates, higher rates of enrollment in the Social Security Disability Insurance program and more Americans struggling to find work. Because those without jobs are excluded from conventional analyses of Americans’ earnings, the statistics we most commonly see — those that illustrate a trend of wage stagnation — present an overly optimistic picture of the middle class.

When we consider all working-age men, including those who are not working, the real earnings of the median male have actually declined by 19 percent since 1970. This means that the median man in 2010 earned as much as the median man did in 1964 — nearly a half century ago. Men with less education face an even bleaker picture; earnings for the median man with a high school diploma and no further schooling fell by 41 percent from 1970 to 2010.

It may be true that the lines have converged to the point that the wage pressures in the economy are affecting women too, but it's disingenuous to deny why we got where we are. Men are losing wages because society prefers to educate women.

[nomorenomore08]

3. Basically people are getting screwed all around. And that needs to be mentioned as much as possible.

It's not a matter of men vs. women, but rather the wealthy elite vs. everybody else. Corporations, generally speaking, will pay workers as little, and treat them as poorly, as they can get away with, which is why we need a higher minimum wage, and better labor protections across the board. In all honesty, the kneejerk anti-labor attitudes in this country infuriate me - that kind of thinking is downright suicidal.