Mike Rowe: Why Are 7.2 Million Able-Bodied Men Not Looking for Work? (Transcript)

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO BOB BARNEY’S MIDDAY BROADCAST: Mike Rowe: Why Are 7.2 Million Able-Bodied Men Not Looking for Work?

Hi, this is Bob Barney with The Plain Truth Today. It’s not going to be me today, I’m just bringing you into a program. Mike Rowe was interviewed by Epoch Time TV and Epoch Times, which is a newspaper you can buy on a website. And his show, which is longer than the average show, is called Why Are 7.2 Million Able-Bodied Men Not Looking for Work? If you remember a show that I did about a month ago about Donald Trump trying to bring manufacturing back to the United States, I had said, you know, we might have a problem bringing back manufacturing to the United States because I know something. I’m a manufacturer. I manufacture automotive paint. And it’s hard to find anybody who wants to work today. And if you find somebody who wants to work, he’s probably over 50. It’s going to be very hard to bring manufacturing, skilled manufacturing back to the United States, when people just simply don’t want to work, especially after COVID. And we have people, we have openings that nobody even applies for. So this is what he has to say. It’s a great title. Why Are 7.2 Million Able-Bodied Men Not Looking for Work? Here’s Mike Rowe:

Jan Jekielek: Mike Rowe, such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders.

Mike Rowe: It’s great to see you again, thanks.

Mr. Jekielek: We’re in an unusual time. American manufacturing is returning, but is just at the very beginning of that road. What are your thoughts on this?

Mr. Rowe: I’m optimistic on the one hand, but I’m a little troubled on the other. Maybe the best way to sum it up is with a series of phone calls that my foundation gets every week now. Most recently, I heard from somebody over at the BlueForge Alliance, that oversees the Maritime Industrial Base. It consists of 15,000 individual companies who are collectively tasked with building our country’s nuclear-powered subs. Their current cadence requires them to deliver three a year; two Virginia class, and one Columbia class.

It’s a massive undertaking. These things are technically breathtaking, and the amount of skilled labor it takes to make one real is mind-boggling. So the guy calls and he says, look, we have to deliver 30 of these things over the next decade, and we need to hire 100,000 skilled workers right now. Then he says, do you know where they are?

I thought for a second and laughed because I get phone calls like this all the time. I didn’t mean to be too glib, but I said, yes, I know where they are. They’re in the eighth grade. That’s where they are right now. And you guys at the Navy and through BlueForge Alliance, just like Ford and Caterpillar and every other big brand in this country that relies on skilled labor, you guys have to make a more persuasive case for the 7.6 million jobs that are currently open that employers are struggling to fill. These are good jobs, six-figure jobs. They’re all welding, pipe fitting, steam fitting, electric, and HVAC. Because that skills gap is real. If the president succeeds in truly reinvigorating American manufacturing, he’s going to run into all of the challenges and obstacles that we are constantly talking about, whether it’s tariffs and unions and so many other things come into play.

But he’s also going to run into not just a skill gap, but a will gap. If we don’t have a workforce that is enthusiastically prepared to go to work, if we don’t have a workforce who is disabused of the stigmas and the stereotypes and the myths and the misperceptions that have kept millions of kids from giving these jobs an honest look, we’re going to have a whole different type of problem.

Back in 2009, when we started the mikeroweWorks Foundation, President Obama announced a commitment to three million shovel-ready jobs. I wrote him an open letter and said, I’m rooting for you. I love this idea. But have you thought about the fact that the country, by and large, is not all that interested in picking up a shovel? If you don’t create some kind of enthusiasm for the very jobs you’re determined to create, then you’re going to wind up in a pretty nasty feedback loop. That’s what we’ve been working on for the last 16 years, and the ship is finally starting to take off.

Mr. Jekielek: Before we continue, as I’m listening to you, I can’t help but think of this crazy irony. Because I remember back in those days, there was this idea that people who had some of these jobs would need to learn to code. Do you remember that?

Mr. Rowe: Sure, right.

Mr. Jekielek: Now we have this massive kind of AI revolution, chatbot and much more evolution and that’s mostly impacting, as I’m taught. I’ve had a few shows on this now, right? The white collar workers, right? There’s a whole lot of people that have quote, unquote, learned to code are actually going to be out of jobs because the AI does it better already. Yes, robots are doing some of the work and are going to be doing some of the work there’s a whole lot of the skilled labor that’s where actually the jobs are going to be that’s what strikes me, right? I don’t know, what are your thoughts here?

Mr. Rowe: My first thought is that Elon Musk just spoke and he would probably be better suited to answer that question uh but from what i’ve seen you’re absolutely right for a long time the robots were coming to upend the jobs in many, many factories. And then there was thought about, well, when the AI and the robots get together, God, what’s that going to do? But now the whole thing is kind of the other way.

The real fear and loathing in the working class that I’ve seen is like paralegals and lawyers and people who really and truly, AI is just bigger IQ, bigger and bigger and bigger IQ. When you apply that level of intelligence to searching and researching, I don’t know how the humans are going to compete. But neither do I know how AI is going to supplant the plumber, who I’m currently waiting three days for, right? They’re in such short supply. I do not understand how it’s going to make the process of physically building a house move faster, right?

So many of these trades that we’ve been talking about elevating and reinvigorating for the last 16 years now, are suddenly in demand in a different way. Because when people look at them, they realize you can’t outsource that. That job’s not going to go away. It might be impacted to some degree by AI. I think AI to some degree is going to impact everything. but these jobs are not going to be replaced. The 7.5 million positions that are open now, if we don’t get in front of it, that number is just going to explode.

Mr. Jekielek: You’re saying that we have to make the trades great again and make them cool again. Mr. Rowe: Make them cool, and it’s happening, right? Like it’s God help us. But if you go on TikTok and if you go on Instagram and some of the other platforms, you‘ll see tradespeople making a really persuasive case for their jobs. They’ll share videos and they’ll show you the wonder of fixing a thing in no uncertain terms, and that helps a lot. On a broad level, we have to understand what we did to incite this. We took shop class out of high school and we did it for a lot of reasons that may or may not have made much sense at the time.

Mr. Jekielek: I loved shop class, by the way. I think I probably was one of the last ones.

Mr. Rowe: I know that I was. When I was in high school, 79, 80, it was still there, but it was winding down. Through the 80s, we really took it out. We just shortchanged that cohort of kids who might have seen something in the vocational world that made sense to their brain. What we did was we removed those jobs from sight for everyone.

On your way to English class from math class, maybe once upon a time you would walk past the wood shop or the metal shop or the auto shop and maybe you‘d look in there and maybe you’d see something that looks like work. Maybe that would get your brain thinking, oh, I wonder what that means. I wonder what that is. That was all removed.

I can’t prove it, but I feel like I could draw a pretty straight line to the removal of shop class to $1.7 trillion in outstanding student loans for non-shop degrees. I think I could draw a pretty straight line from that event to the 7.6 million open jobs that exist now that don’t require a four-year degree, but instead some level of training, right?

You can also just look around more broadly. You can look at Hollywood. You can look at Main Street. You can look anywhere, and you can see the stigmas and the stereotypes that are still in people’s minds that really make it difficult to recruit into the skilled trades. All that crap has to be debunked. People still don’t believe me, even when I show them, not just the stats, but the actual humans who are making 150 grand a year welding with an $8,000 certificate. They just don’t believe it. You have to show them, right?

That’s why I’m here at this event. I really think that part of what has to be on the table in the next couple of years is a concerted effort to debunk that nonsense. Because if we don’t get the next generation really thinking affirmatively about the possibilities of mastering a skill, then those submarines aren’t going to get built, and that’s a matter of national security.

Mr. Jekielek: Mike, I’m going to get you to tell me about your amazing program in one moment. It’s just something else that came to my mind. I understand there’s a very significant number of men today, young men, who are not working and are not even looking. So tell me about that and what do we do about it?

Mr. Rowe: It’s sobering because it doesn’t say anything good about our country. And it really doesn’t say anything good about the individuals either. But it needs to be said because it’s happening right in front of us. And the best guy to talk about this, and I know of, is an economist called Nick Eberstadt, who wrote a book called Men Without Work. Then he republished it during the lockdowns, because so much of what he said had not only come true, it had blasted beyond his worst prognostications.

The number is 7.2 million able-bodied men that are currently not working. Not only are they not working, they’re affirmatively not looking for work. That’s a heck of a thing. When you look at 7.6 million open jobs and 7.2 million able-bodied men who have no interest in them, a rational person would go, God, we just have to hook those groups up together. I don’t know how to do that. I truly don’t, and it worries me.

But I do know that behind those men is a new generation of people coming up. They aren’t the people sitting home spending 2,000 hours a year on their screens. That number is real, by the way. These people are not engaged in civic pursuits. They’re not in the Jaycees. They’re not in the Kiwanis Club. They’re not in Alliance Club. They’re not in their church. They’re not making not doing anything, really.

It’s a different part of the conversation, but it’s important to acknowledge. And yet, it doesn’t change the fact that whether they’re 16 or 17 or 18 or 25-years-old, men or women, this part of our workforce needs to be reinvigorated fast or we have problems that are way beyond my pay grade.

Mr. Jekielek: Let’s talk about what we can do. And, you know, when we were talking privately, you were telling me that basically the sky’s the limit for people that actually want to do this, that actually want to put the nose to the grindstone, work their butts off. You’re there to support them with your foundation. Tell me about that.

Mr. Rowe: We offer work ethic scholarships, and they’re a little different from your typical academic scholarship or your athletic or your artistic scholarship. Scholarships are everything. We look for people. Like, I’m more concerned with your attendance record than I am your GPA. I’m more concerned with, will you fill out our entire application?

You’ve got to jump through some hoops. Can you provide references? Like if you were applying for a job, can you make a persuasive case for yourself? I like to look at a video of the person. I like to have them write an essay. They got to sign a sweat pledge. My sweat pledge is a 12 point statement of belief.

Mr. Jekielek: I’m going to work my butt off basically. That’s the sweat pledge.

Mr. Rowe: It’s a big part of it. Part of it was just an attempt to articulate what I think work ethic is, but part of it too was an attempt to kind of drill down on things like delayed gratification and just a decent attitude and a measure of personal responsibility and gratitude. Like the very first thing in the sweat pledge says, I believe I have won the greatest lottery of all time. I’m alive. I walk the earth. And above all things, I’m grateful.

Mr. Jekielek: I love that.

Mr. Rowe: If you don’t agree with that, we can still be friends, right? I don’t need everybody to agree with me, but this particular pile of free money is not for you. And I tell people that every year. It’s impossible to feel sorry for yourself. It’s impossible to feel like a victim if you’re fundamentally grateful. So the pledge is full of these things that are really easy to make fun of, and people take their shots at it.

And I don’t mind, because I’m super stingy with the money we raise, right? And when I hand it out, I want to make sure it’s to people who at least see the more or less the way I do, and who are genuinely willing to pursue a skill that’s in demand. That’s what matters most. Beyond that, I can’t control what happens, but the business of elevating and celebrating work ethic matters.

We’ve so far awarded about 12 million in these scholarships. We’ll do two-and-a-half million this month. We just opened our next work ethic scholarship program. But the thing is, to your earlier point, it could be 25 million. For the first time now, we have enough interest. People got the memo.

People know that a four-year degree is not a guarantee. They know it’s expensive. Gen Z gets it. Many of their parents are starting to get it. Many guidance counselors are starting to get it, so we’re seeing a level of interest now for the first time. I don’t go out and do the chicken dinners and the golf tournaments. I don’t put the arm on people, but I might start to, honestly. Look, there’s a lot of money here and there are a lot of people who understand that this has to be part of a larger solution. So I‘ll take your money and then that’s how I’ll spend it.

Mr. Jekielek: But something that strikes me here, I don’t think you said it’s free money. I don’t think it’s free money. You’re giving people money to build their character. That’s kind of what I’m hearing here.

Mr. Rowe: I’m making fun of a kind of shorthand that exists in the scholarship game. Like if you’re going to play the scholarship game, you don’t really apply for one scholarship. Because there’s so many out there. It puts the people who administer the scholarships in an interesting spot. Like, if I find somebody who’s a true rock star, maybe I want to pay for their entire education at UTI. Maybe I want to really get behind that person.

At the same time, I want them to have skin in the game. Like, I love helping people later in life who want to retrain, learn a new skill. I like helping people who’ve got a year in and need some help finishing their second year. I like smart people who hustle. The Marine Corps, for instance, has a great scholarship fund that’s earmarked just for sons and daughters of Marines.

So I encourage people who apply for one of my scholarships, if they qualify for that one, to go apply there too. You can get your whole education paid for by three or four different scholarship funds who are all kind of on the same page. Now selfishly, I’d like to do all of it, but that’s the real point. Nobody’s gonna do all of it. And nobody’s actually gonna close the skills gap either.

This is very stoic. This is Sisyphean. This is quixotic. We’re not going to fill 7.6 million jobs tomorrow. But I do think if we start to have the kind of conversation we’re having, and if it catches fire, then things are going to happen fast. And which brings us back to where we started. If the president succeeds, either through tariffs or sheer persuasion to bring manufacturing back to this country, you’re going to see a flight towards skilled labor that I think is probably going to be unrivaled in the history of modern work.

Mr. Jekielek: Really quick, give me some examples of some of the work that people receiving these scholarships are doing, like maybe a handful.

Mr. Rowe: In the broadest way, I’m talking about any job that doesn’t require a four-year degree. The ones that seem to get the most focus right now, welding, electricians, HVAC, plumbing. There are plenty of opportunities in woodworking. There are plenty of opportunities in automotive repair.

A few weeks ago, we auctioned off a truck that these guys built in an auto shop on steroids up in Ohio called Sugar Creek. This truck was amazing. We took it to Barrett-Jackson and they agreed to waive their fees, so we kept all of the money. The truck sold for one-and-a-half million dollars, and they sent me a check the next day. So I got that sitting here along with a pile of other money.

I only point it out because getting the automotive industry really involved in a public way in filling the 70,000 jobs that exist in their industry is no less important than getting the American submarine industrial base really involved in closing the little gap in their place as well. I’ve had a chance to talk to some powerful people about a national campaign to elevate all this, and I’m wide open to doing it.

I think it’s going to happen on the state level too. Both Dakota are doing a great job, South Dakota and North Dakota. In New Hampshire, I just met with Kelly Ayotte, the governor up there. They’ve got a giant campaign to get trade schools back in schools and shop class back in schools.

It’s enormous. It impacts every zip code. It impacts every state. It certainly impacts our country. It impacts the way our country’s perceived. It impacts the unemployment numbers, obviously, but the workforce participation rate as well. We’re talking about the way we choose to define a good job. There’s a whole list of stuff we can’t control, but we can control that, right?

That’s a big part of what my foundation does. Yes, the scholarships are there. Yes, the money’s there. Yes, we would like more of it. But having a conversation that affirmatively helps change the definition of a good job and debunks some of those stigmas and stereotypes, that’s job number one.

Mr. Jekielek: You’re saying that a national campaign with Mike Rowe involved may be in the works?

Mr. Rowe: Look, I would do it. We’re already doing it. We’re just doing it modestly. It was funny. I mean, mikeroweWorks is the name of the campaign. Bobby Kennedy said to me about a year ago when we were talking about all sorts of things, he said, look, I can make it Macroworks. Our country should make it Macroworks. I don’t want to put a.gov after your initiative. I want you to just keep doing exactly what you’re doing, but bigger.

So moving forward, that’s the job. I can tell a story. I can give an interview, but I need to be in the business of introducing the country to hundreds of the people we’ve helped. People who are making 150 grand a year welding. People who took a plumbing certification and turned it into a mechanical contracting business. Cosmetologists, people who are making 80, 90 grand a year cutting hair. It’s honest work.

There’s so many great stories of people who have prospered without a four-year degree. The more of them I tell, the more the needle moves. The more the needle moves, the more money we raise. The more money we raise, the more we can give out. But would I do that? Yes, I would do that.

You know what I think about? When I was a kid, the country had a busted relationship with littering. Like we, we littered. I’m not talking about the green movement or pollution in general. I’m talking very specifically about littering and to change the way the country felt about that. The National Ad Council, with the help of private industry like Coca-Cola and some elected officials and some concerned citizens launched this Keep America Beautiful campaign.

They hired an actor, Iron Eyes Cody, who played the Indian who wept on the side of the highway when a big pile of trash came out of the window and landed at his feet. The same guy is paddling through the rivers that are choked with garbage. The voiceover said, people start pollution, and people can stop it. It took 10 years for the numbers to come around, because it takes a long time to change behavior. But that campaign worked by every measurable metric. It changed the way people behaved and thought about littering.

There’s a corollary with the way we think about the skilled trades, with the way we think about work, with the way we think about work, with the way we think about higher education, vs. what, lower education or everything else. It impacts the way we use the language. It impacts everything.

So yes, on a national level, we ought to be doing something to get people’s attention. The best way to do that is to have somebody tell the stories of people who are really walking the walk. That’s the plan. So, yes, if you know somebody with a few hundred million burning a hole in their pocket.

Mr. Jekielek: I’m not surprised you were talking with Bobby Kennedy, now our HHS secretary here in America, because I know you’ve covered this a million times on your show how important having good gainful work is to one’s psychology and one’s mental health, and how important that is to one’s physical health. It’s deeply connected.

Mr. Rowe: It’s a health issue first. Look, I’m not a political animal and I don’t see eye to eye with Bobby on everything. But he called me a year ago and asked if I had the belly to run with him, actually. It was flattering. I politely declined, but we talked for hours about this exact issue.

I don’t know much about childhood disease or forever wars or all the other things that are on his mind, but I do understand this. He sees it through the lens of reinvigorating the middle class, and I don’t disagree. Other people I’ve talked to see it through the lens of unions, and that’s fine. I got no dog in that hunt, either. My foundation helps union and non-union, I really don’t care.

But I loved the idea of taking what we’ve done to the next level. I’ve always resisted it because I don’t want to get over my skis and I don’t want to write checks that I can’t cash. Like I said, I’m really stingy with my donors’ money. But it’s tipping, and somebody has to do it. I’m game to help however I can.

But the government is going to have to play a role in having a really honest conversation, because if we think we can create jobs simply by bringing manufacturing back and not showing people that a life in that career can lead to something that looks like prosperity, then we better hope AI works, because we’re not going to have the human components standing by to get the job done.

Mr. Jekielek: Currently, birth rates in Western countries are low. There are countries like Hungary that are trying to move the needle. They celebrate motherhood and doing what’s really important for society. It is similar to what you’re doing here.

Mr. Rowe: Two thoughts. You’re talking about gratitude, and that’s why it’s the first tenet in the sweat pledge. The employers have this recruiting challenge. It’s easy to talk about all these people who are unemployed and need the skills and the desire. Those are the parties that push the conversation forward. It’s not really going to change until we have the other 300 million Americans who share my addiction to smooth roads, affordable energy, and indoor plumbing.

Mr. Jekielek: A decent standard of living.

Mr. Rowe: That’s right. National gratitude sounds like a hippy-dippy, irrelevant thing, but it’s not. Because when a kid’s trying to figure out what to do with his or her life, and they look around and they don’t see shop class, and they don’t, if you’re a construction worker working on a road, and the people who drive by give you the finger because you’ve slowed them down, they don’t feel great about their contribution to the bigger picture. But if society has a fundamental appreciation for the underlying topic, then the conversation gets a lot easier.

Second point, regarding the math itself, I’m no Malthusian, and the declining population thing does worry me, but what worries me more is the specific math with regard to the trades. Every year for the last decade or so, for every five tradesmen who retire, two replace them. Five leave, two come in.

Now, you don’t have to be a math major to look at that and say, arithmetic is not on our side. That’s the other thing pushing this forward. I probably should have started with this, but I’ll end with it instead, because bookends are important. Part of what we’re talking about is PR—changing the stigma, stereotypes, myths, and misperception.

But the other thing is just the cold calculus of arithmetic. The numbers are not on our side, and that’s why it’s so important to make the case now to kids who are in middle school and in high school. Because if you’ve got 7.2 million able-bodied men sitting on their ass, pardon me, not impressed by the opportunities that exist, and able, for whatever reason, to not work, we can’t ignore that. It just means we have to act that much faster to get the cohort we have engaged.

That was Mike Rowe, and I just wanted to point out some things that maybe from my point of view, I am a manufacturer of automotive paint, that is where my business gets its money and where the Plain Truth gets its money. It has almost been impossible to get people who want to work in a hard and dirty even cold in the winter and hot in the summer job, to sweat all of the time. I am going to give you one last parting shot because I don’t think anyone in my audience is going to know this fact…an automotive painter at a big shop gets paid by the work hour. In a 40-hour week if they turn 160 hours which is very possible, if the books say it takes 6 hours to paint a fender, but it really takes one hour, they get paid for the 6. The avg painter in America makes about 120 thousand in a year, the avg body man makes about the same amount of money yet, the avg body man is over 50 years old. There are not any young people other than Spanish people that want to work in this field. The avg painter is in his 30s and 40s breathing in all of the toxic fumes which they don’t want to be around for very long. It is your foreign born, especially Spanish speaking or Spanish oriented immigrant that wants to do this job. Who is going to do the job when they are all deported. Do you want to pay 8 to 9 thousand dollars a year for auto insurance because you cannot find anyone to fix cars, so they have to total every car and part them out? That is what is happening, and nobody seems to know this is the case.

This is the problem I see with President Trump, and all of us who want to see manufacturing return to America. We have to face and be honest about this very problem.

I have a friend in the industry who teaches as a retiree, but he taught part time as a favor at a Daytona college auto body class, in around 2002 there were 50 plus places in the class…he said there are 50 openings every year and about half are Hispanic, about 8-10 are black Americans, and 15 were white Americans between the ages 20 – 30 years old. You can be that old and still get into college for auto-body work. He said by week 8 out of a 16 week course, there were 25 people left in class, all 25 were Hispanic and not American citizens.

Think about that.

This is Bob Barney for The Plain Truth Today saying goodbye, friends.