Republicans lead Ways and Means hearing to improve male workforce participation

A steady decline over decades of men in the workforce that has resulted in a record number of job openings was the subject of a recent hearing by a House Ways and Means subcommittee, which is working toward reforming welfare programs to help more people enter the labor force.

U.S. Rep. Adrian Smith (R-NE), the chairman of the House Ways and Means Subcommittee on Human Resources, convened the hearing to explore reasons for the decline in working-age male participation in the labor force, and possible solutions to address them. U.S. Reps. Mike Bishop (R-MI) and Jackie Walorski (R-IN), both members of the subcommittee, highlighted the impact of opioid and substance abuse on the workforce.

“Today, there are more than 7 million working-age men in America who are not working or looking for work,” Smith said. “Unfortunately, this is not a new phenomenon. The large number of men not in the labor force is a trend which has been growing for the past 50 years.”

Today only 88 percent of men are employed or looking for work compared to 96 percent in 1967, Smith said, adding that the figures are worse for men without a high school diploma. Furthermore, among developed nations the United States ranks near the bottom in prime-age male labor force participation despite having a record number of jobs since 2001, Smith said.

Walorski noted that in her district in northern Indiana, there currently is one county that has 30,000 jobs available. “There are plenty of reasons for this, but I hear it every day from everybody and their brother: they can’t hire workers that can pass a drug test. This is in relation to this latest onslaught of opioid addiction.”

Walorski questioned Brent Orrell, the vice president of family and economic stability at ICF International, about the link between opioid addiction and unemployment. Orrell pointed to a complex series of factors.

“It’s not only unemployment, it’s breakdown of families, it’s the dissolution of other community institutions, it’s problems in marriage, it’s all sorts of things that feed into it,” Orrell said. “But after you control for all of that, you don’t really see the rise in the kind of deaths of despair that we’ve seen until you see the deindustrialization of the American economy and the loss of those jobs. Unemployment, they argue, is really at the base of this.”

Tyrone Ferrens, a graduate of a workforce training program called Project JumpStart, described how three generations of his family had been able to overcome drug abuse and reenter the workforce because of the skills and resources the program provided to them.

“I’ve been a recipient of welfare, food-stamps, a lot of government assistance programs and there is no comparison, none whatsoever … I would have much preferred someone given me or exposed me to a program like JumpStart rather than me getting a check on the 3rd…,” Ferrens said.

Under the program, he described how he received training in everything from math to resume preparation. “We were taught what employers were expecting from us, and just how to be successful on the job site … something I have never been exposed to before,” he said.

Bishop commented that Ferrens’ story is “really quite inspiring and compelling,” adding, “I think it sheds light on an important need in public policy in this country.”