So What, Who Cares (vol 3, issue 37) Why the rise in U.S. women's unemployment is nearly invisible
Hello!
Two things: First, I apologize for not sending this out on Friday as per usual. I took the day off for my daughter's dance recital dress rehearsal and a post-rehearsal Fancy Lady Lunch with her. Then, over the weekend, someone moved Alameda to the surface of the sun and it was too hot to remember anything.
Second: I have a face made for podcasting, which is why I hesitate to post this here, but I was lucky enough to be on last Sunday's live two-hour tech news roundtable TV show The Week in Tech along with Mikah Sargent (@mikahsargent), Harry McCracken (@harrymccracken) and guest host Jason Snell (@jsnell).
We had a great time talking about Apple, Uber's no-good-very-bad-week, and the Amazon v. Walmart battle, which inspired my metaphor (and the show's title), "Snakes versus Alligators." It was a blast and I hope to be able to do it again!
*
When an entire category of jobs goes away, there's a ripple effect felt across economies on town, state and national levels. For example, during the Great Recession, 2.1 million manufacturing jobs were eliminated, as were nearly 2 million construction jobs -- this rippled through towns where factories used to be the engine that drove the economy, and it rippled out to the developments where construction workers used to go to work and then come home.
We're seeing wholesale job elimination happen with retail. There are an estimated 4.5 million retail associate jobs, but the slew of retailer bankruptcies this year -- Gymboree filed this week -- and retail store shutterings will cut into that. Adding to the pain: the robots are coming for as many as 6 million retail jobs and e-commerce will likely eliminate another 30-50% of retail jobs.
As Diane Stafford of the Kansas City Star put it, "Millions of retail jobs — as we now know them — are going the way of gas station attendants. Just as ATMs replaced many bank tellers, automated check-out stations are supplanting retail clerks."
So what? A lot has been made of "mancessions" -- witness the tide of stories talking about the crises of masculinity men suffered when their mining, manufacturing and construction jobs went away. But department stores, where approximately 60% of the workforce is female, have lost half a million jobs since 2001 -- that's 18 times the number of mining jobs that went away in the same period.
Why we should care about the disappearance of mining or manufacturing jobs often comes down to two things: well-paying jobs for people without college educations went away, and the industry pulling out of a town often left nothing left. However, department stores used to anchor shopping malls. Local stores used to anchor downtown areas. When a retail outlet closes, the jobs lost may not have paid as well as, say, a miner's job. But those jobs often had flexible hours, and the importance of that kind of employment should not be overlooked.
The U.S. is over-retailed (remember this column?) and there are massive cultural shifts rocking retail -- everything from e-commerce grabbing a larger percentage of consumer dollars to younger adults just not being that into shopping. There will be an accompanying loss of jobs, most of them women's jobs.
Who cares? All those economists doing a slow-motion freakout over U.S. women's decline in workforce participation, because losing jobs in the predominantly female clothing-retail and department-store sector is not going to help that particular trend. Communities that will be reeling from losing the revenue that a shopping mall brought in will be further affected by a smaller workforce that pay less in taxes. Families will miss the money Mom used to bring in.
And women will be looking for jobs that value the same skills retail jobs did -- an ability to put up with what could charitably be called life's rich pageant, an attention to detail, effective communications skills, time management in busy and high-stress periods. The question is where those jobs will be, what they'll pay and whether employers have the ability to see how skills from one specific industry sector transfer to another.
One possible bright spot: E-commerce. Economist Michael Mandel estimates that e-commerce has created 355,000 new jobs, many of them paying better than retail sale associates do and providing workers the opportunity to do more skilled labor, thereby boosting future earnings and employability. I say possible because, as Virginia Postrel points out, a lot of the e-commerce retail growth has been in male-dominated transportation and warehouse jobs at fulfillment centers. We don't know yet if women will be willing or able to crack these better-paying fields. And unlike retail outlets, which are all over the country, fulfillment centers for e-commerce are centered in only a few places in the U.S. Hearing about how warehousing job wages grow at twice the national rate does nothing for a laid-off retail worker who's nowhere near one of those fulfillment centers.
Thousands upon thousands of retail jobs that will be lost this year, all over the country. Consider how widespread the effects will be -- and ask whether the same people who have been wringing their hands over the men who lost their mining jobs should be equally distressed when eighteen times the workforce is also going without work.
*
Your pop culture recommendation for the day: As soon as I saw this article on the emptying Italian village of Civitacampomarano and its street festival, which uses art to grapple with the village's steady depopulation, I was reminded of a piece I had read about the steadily-depopulating village of Nagoro, in southern Japan, where Tsukimi Ayano has been making life-sized dolls to replace her deceased or relocated neighbors, and of the Belgian village of Doel, which has dwindled from 1000 people to 20 and become a cause for local graffiti artists, and of an abandoned farmhouse in Manitoba, Canada, which was turned into a life-sized dollhouse by Heather Benning.
How people who have been left behind deal with the hollowing out of their town is a subject of perpetual fascination for me, and as people increasingly aggregate in urban areas, we're going to be seeing more and more of this. The art-as-memento-mori phenomenon is also logged in the United States: the ghost town of Rhyolite, NV, is home to an installation of ghost sculptures, and there's an entire round-up of places in California where artists have repurposed ghost towns as creative canvases.
Of course, looking at how artists engage with abandoned urban spaces takes up a whole other post. Until next time ...
*