It’s been just over 40 years since Springsteen’s bestselling Born in the USA came out in 1984 — an album with “a rowdy indomitable spirit,” as Debby Miller wrote in Rolling Stone at the time.
The melodies suggested a deep optimism but the lyrics were primarily concerned with “people … getting left behind” full of foreboding of the fate of small-town America and the working class in the face of deindustrialization. Springsteen could see what was coming. In the four decades since, we have seen a collapse of blue-collar work with more than 6 million manufacturing jobs being lost.
Real wages for working class men have gone down since then by 11%, while they went up for college graduates by 15%. This has hit men especially hard. The U.S. economy saw over 9 million healthcare jobs added to the labor market since 1990, with most of the non-college educated jobs taken in that field by women, at a rate of 80%.
This seesaw of fortunes has led to real world problems. In the 1980s the high-school-only-educated man was more likely to be married and living with children than his college-educated counterpart. Those were the “It’s morning again in America” Reagan days. Back then 59% of high-school-only educated men were married living with children, compared to 55% among the college-educated.
Today the position is reversed. Over the last 40 years, marriage rates have gone down for all but with marked effect among the working class. By 2021, only 34% of high school-only educated men were married living with children, compared to 44% of college-educated men. The overall gap in marriage rates is even wider when not including children. Here only 39% of high-school-only-educated people ages 18-55 are married, compared to 58% of college-educated people.
This is causing something of a crisis. Because one of the surprising findings in recent research is that, for all the advance in women’s equality in the last 40 years, some gender norms are still deeply felt. Women want a bread winner and to marry a man of higher status than them, with more than three quarters of never-married women wanting a spouse with a steady job according to Pew.
The lack of marriageable men is a crisis for working-class women too. While some women are “marrying up,” the lack of working-class men suitable for the marriage market is driving America’s global leadership in single parenting.
But wider social ties are also dissolving among America’s working class. The social recession has been well documented and recorded, as loss of jobs led many men adrift with a large uptick in disability welfare recipients. Men retreated from work then retreated from relationships, with a rise in men living alone or without children. The relationship decline correlated not just with a drop in both church attendance and “secular” expressions of community too. Not only did families break down, but there has been a decline in the number of families forming in the first place.
Losing income, friends, and family has occurred at the same time as a huge uptick in deaths of despair — deaths from drug overdoses, suicides, and alcoholism — among working-class women and especially men. The overall picture is gloomy, and well described in Vice President JD Vance’s memoir, Hillbilly Elegy.
“Born in the USA” in 1984 for those in the working class meant being born into a stable, married family. “Born in the USA” working-class today means slim prospects for stable relationships in both childhood and adulthood. Instead, you have high chances of being born into a disintegrated family in the context of a thinning social fabric. This has a toxic effect overall on life chances — and the prospect for perpetuating that lack in the event you do have children.
This is not a viable status quo, and if we are to return to the glory days, an administration must look at how to reverse this trend of income and relational collapse among the working class.
To that end, in a report out this week from the Institute for Family Studies by Brad Wilcox and Grant Martsolf of the University of Pittsburgh, a closer look at working-class men’s jobs, in both the public and private sector, reveals some glimmers of hope.
It turns out there are some jobs where working-class married men live with their children at a much higher rate than others. The top jobs for family formation for working-class men are in the public sector: armed services and first responders. Trucking and construction are the top jobs for family formation for working-class men in the private sector.
Those jobs with higher rates of married men share several key characteristics: a good wage, job stability, and job benefits.
Almost 80% of the difference between the rates of marriage of college-educated men in contrast to working class can be attributed to differences in these three job characteristics.
The findings will be good news to any administration that wants to make sure that being “Born in the USA” is a win for those in working-class jobs. It’s also a clear signal to employers who want to have a stable workforce and a buoyant customer base. It’s time to hit the brakes on this downbound train, and the findings in this report perhaps point to some real-life ideas for how.
Grant Martsolf, Brad Wilcox, “Good Jobs, Strong Families: How the Character of Men’s Work is Linked to Their Family Status,” Institute for Family Studies, April 2025 will be published at ifstudies.org
Chris Bullivant is Director of Communications at the Institute for Family Studies. Grant Martsolf is a professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Nursing. Brad Wilcox is Director of the Get Married Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies.
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
