Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

This paper explores the “economic mystery” (Noguchi 2016) declining labor force participation among prime-age men using in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 61 working-class men from rural Pennsylvania. This qualitative examination is designed to inform findings from survey research and administrative records about declining labor force participation by setting labor force decisions within the context of men’s lives, families, and communities. The novel contribution in this chapter is the discovery of what I call chronic churning, a phenomenon in which men leave the labor force for extended periods but almost always return and often persist in formal employment. While there is evidence of men moving in and out of the labor force in the shorter term (Coglianese 2017), the discovery of chronic churning contributes a unique explanation of what may be driving increased rates of nonparticipation in the labor force. Among the men in this study, permanent labor force dropout was rare, but many men in the study left the labor force for extended periods of time.

This finding suggests that even long bouts of nonparticipation are not permanent, and men who have such spells outside the labor force have not lost their desire to work. It also challenges the implicit notion that workers and nonworkers are relatively fixed categories that are stable over time and pushes back against analyses that have reified these survey categorizations of worker and nonworker into de facto social classes with qualitative commonalties. The picture that emerges in this study is that most men are working most of the time, but a closer examination of lifetime labor force narratives finds that periods of nonwork, including those lasting one year or more, are often “hidden” in plain sight within the histories of otherwise working men.

Coglianese, John. 2017. “The Rise of In-and-Outs: Declining Labor Force Participation of Prime Age Men.” Job Market Paper, Harvard University. Https://Scholar. Harvard. Edu/Coglianese/Publications/Rise-of-in-and-Outs.

Noguchi, Yuki. 2016. “An Economic Mystery: Why Are Men Leaving The Workforce?” NPR.Org, September 6.