Say the phrase “dignity of work” in the wrong crowd, and you’re asking for a foul-mouthed Twitter mob or at least dismissive snickers. A certain type of Leftist believes “dignity of work” is a lie foisted upon the proletariat by the bourgeoisie. A certain type of libertarian believes work is nothing more than a transactional exchange of labor for currency.
Of course, most people, Left, Right, and libertarian, know that work is a good thing. It doesn’t even have to be paid work. Labor, set to producing things people can use or providing services that people want, is an ennobling undertaking. It is in fact a precondition for a truly happy life. And a recent study by the Senate’s Joint Economic Committee reinforces this idea.
Being out of work, and in particular out of the workforce, is very highly correlated with very bad outcomes, say researchers at the JEC’s Social Capital Project. The project’s latest study compared employed adults to the adults who are neither working nor seeking work, calling this latter group the “inactive.”
What sort of men are neither working nor seeking work? The study divvied them up into five categories: The retired, the homemakers, and the students are three categories. The two largest groups, however, are the disabled, and finally a group that is none of the above — not in school, not retired, not charged with raising kids, and not disabled. The study just calls them “other.”
The “other” and the disabled add up to about 70 percent of all the “inactive” Americans. That’s about 8 percent of the country, or about 1 in 12. These folks aren’t doing well, by all sorts of measures that you may not have guessed.
One-third of the disabled inactive men never graduated high school, for instance, compared to 11 percent of employed people. Drug use is much higher among the inactive. So is poverty.
Here’s a less obvious and more important set of numbers: The inactive are twice as likely as the employed to say they don’t get invited to events with others. They are less likely to say they have friends they could call on to help them move.
The inactive are far more likely to be divorced than are the employed. Specifically, the divorce rate among disabled men is 38 percent, and among the “others” is 31 percent, compared to 22 percent among the employed.
There’s plenty more data on this point, from many sources. Nick Eberstadt, my colleague at the American Enterprise Institute has written plenty about the grim existence of the American men who are not in the labor force. They’re not using their free time to volunteer, go to church, or hang out with friends.
The inactive, Eberstadt writes, don’t do “much in the way of child care or help for others in the home either, despite the abundance of time on their hands. Their routine, instead, typically centers on watching—watching TV, DVDs, Internet, hand-held devices, etc.—and for an average of 2,000 hours a year, as if it were a full-time job.”
That is, they’re idle.
And with that word, “idle,” we return to the sort of discussion that can enrage the Left. Idleness is a vice, and so to talk about those outside of the workforce as “idle” sounds to many liberals like we’re blaming the victims.
The assignment or inference of blame is unnecessary, though. Idleness can be understood not just as a vice, but as an affliction.
The men out of the labor force are disproportionately unmarried. They’re alienated from civil society, as the new data reaffirms. Their absence from the workforce is one more instance of that alienation. It’s another way in which these men are left standing alone, without the human connections we all need.
Without work, without a wife, without kids, these men lack purpose. They can easily see themselves as useless.
They also lack the sort of networks that keep the rest of us from idleness. If many of us are busy, our weeks filled with obligations, that’s often not the result of some innate virtue of industriousness, but that we’ve been roped into things — by our colleagues, by the church lady, by our kids’ school, by our wives.
If you don’t have colleagues, church friends, kids’ schools, or a wife — as these “inactive” men seem not to have — then you aren’t handed a million things to do.
And that existence, where you feel nobody needs you is a grim one, lacking dignity.
