Why men don’t want to work any more
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 17 October 2022
⏱️ 17 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
As many as 7 million Americans who could work, aren’t. These are people who have dropped out of the workforce - they have given up on finding a job or are simply not looking.
And similar trends can be seen in other wealthy countries. So what is going on?
Ed Butler speaks to Nicholas Eberstadt, a researcher at the American Enterprise Institute.
He’s recently updated a book which examines the extraordinary increase in men – and it is mainly men in the US - who’ve decided they don’t just want to quit their jobs, they want to leave the workplace for good. And it’s something that’s been going on since the 1960s.
Presented and produced by Ed Butler.
(Image: Men on a building site. Credit: Getty)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi there, welcome to Business Daily from the BBC World Service. |
| 0:04.4 | My name's Ed Butler, and in today's show, we're looking at an invisible crisis of modern society, one that few are even noticing, men who simply don't want to work anymore. |
| 0:16.1 | There are over 7 million dropouts from the workforce. men have been in the position of being providers, |
| 0:24.7 | and now a growing share of U.S. men of working age are in the position of being dependents. |
| 0:33.4 | A leading researcher tells us about this crisis of confidence, |
| 0:36.7 | especially amongst men turning off and dropping out. |
| 0:40.4 | That's Business Daily from the BBC. |
| 0:45.6 | I look forward to the day versus dreading going into work |
| 0:49.4 | because I don't consider what I do work. |
| 0:51.9 | This is Josh, a sometime forklift truck driver from West Virginia. |
| 0:57.1 | For him, the pandemic changed everything in his life. |
| 1:00.5 | A series of family crises forced him to make a stark choice. |
| 1:04.6 | Do I care more about my loved ones or my job? |
| 1:08.1 | We thought my daughter had cancer at one point, |
| 1:14.5 | and I was at work. |
| 1:15.6 | I couldn't leave. |
| 1:18.4 | And they were like, oh, well, if you leave, you know, |
| 1:19.4 | it's going to be a write-up. |
| 1:22.3 | And at that point, I was just like, you know what? |
| 1:24.8 | I parked my forklift, got off of it. I said, do what you got to do. |
| 1:26.3 | Left. |
| 1:28.1 | Then my grandmother passed. |
... |
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