Blue collar US males lose more ground due to recession

Rodney Ringler is an unemployed blue collar male without a college degree. He's hardly alone. Men like him have been the main victims of the current recession in the US.

"I haven't worked since December 2007, around the time this recession started," Mr Ringler, a 49-year-old computer technician, said as he walked his dog in a Dallas suburb.

He sees little light at the end of the tunnel.

"I've been looking to get into law enforcement because it's a growth area," he said, but had no immediate prospects.

One statistic that stands out in America's recession-stung economy is the unemployment rate for adult men: In April for the second month in a row it surged ahead of the national average to 9.4 per cent versus 8.9 per cent for all workers. The jobless rate for adult women was 7.1 per cent.

The reasons are clear: Male-heavy sectors such as construction and manufacturing have been hard hit. But the implications may be dire for the broader economy and hamper the recovery as families that once had male breadwinners struggle.

"In the 2001 recession, 51 per cent of all job losses were for men. It was evenly split. But in this recession 80 per cent of the jobs that have been lost have been men's," said Andrew Sum, a labour economics professor at Northeastern University who has studied this issue in detail.

Men also incurred about 80 per cent of the job losses in the 1990-91 recession, but the numbers this time were dramatically different. In the 1990-91 recession, men lost 1.037 million jobs. They have lost 4.5 million to date in this one.

The male jobless rate is pumped up by white collar banking jobs lost during the global financial crisis. A few of these may have been sent overseas but job growth in this sector should come back in time, analysts said.

The fact that American males without a college degree are especially vulnerable in this cycle point to more hard times ahead for the US working class, which has endured stagnant and declining wages for the last three decades. The skilled and semi-skilled jobs they traditionally held have been moving overseas to places like China and Vietnam. The jobs that remain pay less, amid declining union membership.

The growth in family incomes is mostly from women entering the workforce. But during this recession that will hardly compensate given the scale of male job losses.

For those without a college degree or better, it has been a bloodbath.

Mr Sum said in the last recession the effects were felt more evenly across gender and occupational lines and that construction jobs grew from mid-2002 onward at a strong rate through 2007. But production and manufacturing jobs fell steadily through 2005 before making a modest recovery, and then falling swiftly.

This is grim news for struggling blue collar families. While women's role in the workforce has expanded, by some estimates the male remains the main breadwinner in about 75 per cent of two-income US households.

"When males lose their jobs ... women become more important to family income, and those that have not been work-ing will re-enter the labour market to sustain family income," said Peter Doeringer, a professor of economics at Boston University.

But many manufacturing jobs are gone for good, as huge sectors like the auto industry suffer profound cuts. Prof. Doeringer said the recession will leave the economy "sharply restructured".