Paul Rizzo with his wife Tiffany and their sons Chase and Ryder outside their home in Kenner, La., November 28, 2022. (Emily Kask/The New York Times)
For the past five months, Paul Rizzo, 38, has been delivering groceries and groceries through the DoorDash app. But he spent the first half of 2022 earning no paycheck at all — reflecting a surprising trend among middle-aged men.
After learning last Christmas that his job as an analyst at a hospital company was being automated, Rizzo decided to stay at home to look after his two young sons. His wife wanted to return to work, and he was disheartened in his own career after more than a decade of corporate turmoil and repeated disappointments. He figured he could earn enough income from his investments to pull it off financially.
Rizzo’s decision to retire during his prime working years portends one of the biggest surprises in today’s job market: Hundreds of thousands of men in their late 30s and early 40s stopped working during the pandemic and have been on the margins of the labor market ever since. While Rizzo has been making money again lately, many men his age seem to be staying away from paid work altogether. They are an anomaly as employment rates have recovered more strongly for women of the same age and for both younger and older men.
Sign up for the New York Times morning newsletter
About 89.7% of men aged 35 to 44 were working or looking for work in November, up from 90.9% before the pandemic. The group’s employment rate showed signs of recovery last month but was unusually low when averaged over the past year.
The decline in labor force participation among middle-aged men spans racial groups but is most concentrated in men who — like Rizzo — do not have a four-year college degree. The pullback comes despite the fact that wages are rising and job opportunities are plentiful, including in areas like trucking and construction, where college degrees are not required and men tend to dominate.
Economists have not identified a single factor preventing men from returning to work. Instead, they attribute the trend to a cocktail of changing social norms surrounding parenting and marriage, shifting opportunities and lingering scars from the 2008-09 downturn – which cost many people in this age group jobs when they first started their careers.
The story goes on
“Now you’re suddenly taking control of your life, and if you’re in the wrong industry…” Rizzo said, trailing off as he discussed his recent job experiences. “I wasn’t the only one who dropped out. I can tell you that.”
Men have been withdrawing from working life for decades. In the years after World War II, more than 97% of men in their prime—defined by economists as ages 25 to 54—were employed or actively looking for work, according to federal data. But from the 1960s that proportion began to decline, reflecting the decline in domestic manufacturing jobs.
What is new is that a small demographic – men who were early in their careers during the 2008 recession – appear to have been hardest hit.
“I think there are a lot of very discouraged people out there,” said Jane Oates, a former Labor Department official who now runs WorkingNation, a nonprofit focused on human resource development.
Men lost jobs in staggering numbers during the 2008 financial crisis as the construction and housing sectors contracted. It took years to regain that ground; among men who were then in their 20s and early 30s and just starting out in their careers, employment rates never fully recovered.
Economists have found a number of explanations for men’s slow return to the labor market. After the war on crime in the 1980s and 1990s, more men had criminal records, which made it difficult to get jobs. The rise of opioid addiction had sidelined others. The quality of video games had improved, making it more attractive to stay at home. And the decline of the nuclear family may have diminished the traditional male role as economic provider.
Now recent history seems to be repeating itself – but for a specific age group. The question is why males aged 35-44 seem to remain unemployed and looking for work more than other demographics.
Patricia Blumenauer, vice president of data and operations at Philadelphia Works, a human resources development agency, said she’s seen a decrease in the number of men in this age group who are eligible for services. A disproportionately high proportion of those who go on vacation without taking up a job.
Blumenauer said the age group is a group “that we don’t see emerging.” She believes some men who lost their blue-collar jobs early in the pandemic may be looking for something with flexibility and higher pay. “The ability to work from home three days a week or have a four-day weekend — things that other jobs have figured out — isn’t possible for these types of jobs.”
When men can’t find or compete for these flexible jobs, they may choose to make ends meet by staying with relatives or working under the table, Blumenauer said.
The pandemic has also likely slowed America’s already sluggish family formation and given single or childless men less incentive to settle into steady jobs, said economist Ariel Binder. On the other hand, disruptions in schooling and childcare mean that some men who already had families may have stopped doing paid work to take on more household chores.
“So on one side you have these men who just don’t expect to have a stable romantic relationship for most of their lives and schedule their time allocation accordingly,” Binder said. “Then there are men who participate in these family structures, but in non-traditional ways.”
Like labor market experts, government data suggests a combination of forces are at play.
A growing number of men do appear to be taking on more childcare responsibilities, as suggested by time commitments and other survey data. But a shift toward stay-at-home dads probably isn’t the whole story; Employment trends look the same for men in the age group who report living with young children and those who don’t.
What really counts is education. The decline in labor force participation is more concentrated among those without a college degree, based on detailed government survey data.
Some economists speculate that the disproportionate decline may be because the age group has been hit by repeated crises, leaving their labor market base fragile. Losing their jobs early in their careers in 2008, they faced a slow recovery thereafter and found themselves at risk again amid layoffs in 2020 and an ongoing shift toward automation.
“This group has been hit by automation and globalization,” said David Dorn, a Swiss economist who studies labor markets.
This fragility theory makes sense to Rizzo.
He had viewed the Navy as his ticket out of Louisiana poverty and expected to have a career in the service until he broke his back during basic training. He retired from the military after a few years. Then he turned around, earned a two-year degree in Georgia and began a bachelor’s degree at Arizona State University with dreams of one day working to cure cancer.
Then came the Great Recession. Rizzo had worked nights in a lab to pay rent and tuition, but the job ended abruptly in 2009. Phoenix was at the nexus of the aftermath of the financial implosion.
Frantic applications brought nothing, and Rizzo had to drop out of school. Worse, he stared at the impending homelessness. His tax refund saved him by allowing him and his wife to return to Louisiana where there were more jobs. But after they divorced, he hit rock bottom.
“After my 20s, I had nothing to show for my life,” he explained.
Rizzo spent the next decade rebuilding. He worked his way through various corporate positions where he mastered Excel and Microsoft SharePoint, remarried, had two sons and bought a house.
Still, he regularly ran the risk of losing work to job cuts or technology—including late last year. The company he worked for wanted him to move into a new role, perhaps as a traveling salesman, when his desk job disappeared. But his sons have special needs and that wasn’t an option.
He resigned in January. He watched the kids, posted on his investment-related YouTube channel, and watched Netflix. He figured he might be able to live off military pay and dividend income and become part of the Financial Independence Early Retirement trend, or FIRE. But then the Federal Reserve hiked interest rates and markets wobbled.
“I’ve got FIRE, all right,” he said. “My whole portfolio was set on fire.”
Rizzo turned to DoorDash and earned his first paycheck on July 4th. While he’s technically back on the job, gig work like his doesn’t measure well in job data. If many men follow a similar path but don’t work every week, they may be overlooked in surveys that ask if anyone worked for pay the previous week to determine if they were employed.
Rizzo waits to see what happens to his DoorDash income during an economic downturn before retiring from work at the company forever. Other dashers are already complaining that business is slowing as people have spent their pandemic savings.
The veteran considers himself lucky. He knows men of his generation who find it difficult to gain a foothold in the job market.
“It feels like the aftermath of 2008 and 2009,” he said. “Everyone had to start their lives from scratch.”
© 2022 The New York Times Company