Behind much of the MAGA economic agenda lies a concern with restoring manly jobs. Coal miners want to mine! says Donald Trump. “They’re good, strong guys,” he says. “That’s what they want to do. They love to dig coal, that’s what they want to do. They don’t want to do gidgets and widgets and wadgets. They don’t want to build cell phones with their hands, their big, strong hands.”
Back during the campaign, J.D. Vance argued that the U.S. needed to crack down on illegal immigration so that businesses would have to pay high wages and hire the seven million prime-age American men who’ve dropped out of the labor force. Some of those men, he acknowledged, might be “struggling with addiction,” but employers shouldn’t give up on their fellow citizens.
I’m sympathetic with the critiques of researchers like Richard Reeves, who warn that boys and men are, at least in some contexts, being marginalized. It’s foolish and unjust to marginalize half the human race, whichever half you pick.
That said, there is a lot wrong with the MAGA story about manly jobs, starting with the desirability of mining coal. Although conditions have improved over time, coal mining is a terrible job. As George Orwell wrote,
More than anyone else, perhaps, the miner can stand as the type of the manual worker, not only because his work is so exaggeratedly awful, but also because it is so vitally necessary and yet so remote from our experience, so invisible, as it were, that we are capable of forgetting it as we forget the blood in our veins. In a way it is even humiliating to watch coal-miners working. It raises in you a momentary doubt about your own status as an ‘intellectual’ and a superior person generally. For it is brought home to you, at least while you are watching, that it is only because miners sweat their guts out that superior persons can remain superior. You and I and the editor of the Times Lit. Supp., and the poets and the Archbishop of Canterbury and Comrade X, author of Marxism for Infants — all of us really owe the comparative decency of our lives to poor drudges underground, blackened to the eyes, with their throats full of coal dust, driving their shovels forward with arms and belly muscles of steel.
In the 1980s, it was common to read of Japanese workers who had begun to shun 3K jobs “kitanai, kiken, kitsui (respectively 汚い “dirty”, 危険 “dangerous”, きつい “demanding”).” The phenomenon was not unique to Japan. Given a choice, most people—including most men—prefer clean, safe, enjoyable work. An X-ray technician, phlebotomist, or smartphone salesman is not emasculated because he doesn’t need an immediate shower when he comes home from work.
What has actually happened is not that men can’t find employment. It’s that today’s well-paid “masculine” jobs generally require more self-discipline than the regimentation of a factory. A construction site has bosses but you don’t work at machine pace. The same is true of a warehouse or hospital. Autonomy has increased but, with it, so has the need for continuous self-control, even in environments where workers and results are strictly monitored.
Higher pay also tends to come along with high levels of equipment (aka capital) rather than labor-intensive work. A real Amazon warehouse doesn’t look like ChatGPT’s rendition above. It looks more like this photo, taken during the Christmas rush in 2016, when this Amazon warehouse in Wales had more than the usual number of workers:
With all those big machines, warehouse work may be “masculine,” but it also requires more capital than labor.
Credit: Matthew Horwood for Alamy
Those much-lamented factory jobs bring to mind two stories from my past. The first was my ninth-grade social studies teacher, a Michigan native who wound up in Greenville because he went to Bob Jones University, recounting tales of his summers working on auto assembly lines. This was in the 1970s, when Detroit was still fat and complacent. The work was so mindlessly boring, he said, that the workers would occasionally deliberately wreck a partially assembled car for fun.
The second was much later, back in 2005, when I was researching this article on a furniture company in Dallas. The factory was as clean and pleasant as a factory can be, the pay was good for the area, and the work, while somewhat repetitive, was close enough to craftsmanship to seem satisfying. Almost all of the workers were immigrants, and the company was eager to hire their U.S.-born children. But the kids weren’t interested, and not only because some were upwardly mobile. They would rather take jobs at Target, an executive told me, where the pay was lower but work was less structured and more sociable.
Sometimes factory evolution has its own labor-market surprises. Take the flat-pack furniture pioneered by IKEA. It reduces shipping costs, allows high levels of factory automation, and complements computer-aided design tools. Check out this video of a Polish flat-pack furniture factory.
It also creates masculine jobs outside the factory, as I was reminded yesterday when I hired a guy on Taskrabbit to assemble a couple of pieces of furniture for me. Owned by IKEA since 2017, Taskrabbit makes flat-pack furniture accessible to people who are spatially challenged or short on time and patience. It takes advantage of specialization. But to succeed as a gig worker, you need to be diligent, efficient, and reliable. Vance’s seven million male labor force dropouts either wouldn’t make it as “taskers” or simply prefer their nonwork alternatives.
All of this is a long setup to the following article from my archives. Published in 2017, it got almost no attention at the time, even though it made what I think is a significant point. An AI-assisted check to update the statistics confirms that the trend is still in full force and has, if anything, accelerated. Men are winning! Women are losing! Of course, it’s just one (very large) sector of the economy.
Read: The End of Men? Not in the Retail Sector (Bloomberg.com).
Virginia Postrel is a writer with a particular interest in the intersection of commerce, culture, and technology. Author of “The Future and Its Enemies,” “The Substance of Style,” “The Power of Glamour,” and, most recently, “The Fabric of Civilization.” This essay was part of a larger essay originally published in Virginia’s newsletter on Substack.
Header image by Galt Museum & Archives on Unsplash: 1909 photograph of coal miners and horse-drawn coal cars outside the entrance to the No. 10 City Drift Mine in Lethbridge, located north of the municipal power plant.
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