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    Blue Collar Frayed: Working Men in Tomorrow’s Economy
    Blue Collar Frayed: Working Men in Tomorrow’s Economy
    Blue Collar Frayed: Working Men in Tomorrow’s Economy
    Ebook155 pages2 hours

    Blue Collar Frayed: Working Men in Tomorrow’s Economy

    By Jennifer Rayner

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    About this ebook

    I remember with incredible clarity the question that rang through his words and hung in the air between us, the query that hurt my head and heart as his baggy eyes held mine: where does someone like me fit, now?

    Jennifer Rayner knows a thing or two about blue-collar blokes: her brother, her dad and her grandfather all make a living with their hands. But blue-collar jobs for Australian men are disappearing at a rapid rate, and this is not just a product of unstoppable economic forces – it’s also the result of our failure to acknowledge the importance of those jobs and the people who do them. The men now losing their jobs in heavy industry or trades will not easily find new work in Australia’s growing service industries; the evidence shows they are disengaging from the workforce instead.

    Drawing on extensive research and dozens of interviews, Rayner argues that there can be blue-collar jobs in our future economy. In fact, we can’t keep building a fair and prosperous Australia without them.

    Humane and clear-eyed, Blue Collar Frayed is a vital contribution to our national conversation.

    ‘Essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the impact of change in our society.’ —Former ACTU secretary Bill Kelty

    ‘Well-researched, humane, and utterly vital. The book we need now for the Australian workforce we want to have.’ —Richard Denniss, Chief Economist, The Australia Institute

    ‘Jennifer Rayner’s well researched and compelling account of our changing workforce is essential reading if you are wondering where technology is leading our economy and the people who make that economy function. She understands the workers behind the economic data and so she has accomplished something rare and important: economics with heart and soul.’ ​—Rebecca Huntley, social researcher and author of Still Lucky
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBlack Inc. Books
    Release dateApr 2, 2018
    ISBN9781743820452
    Blue Collar Frayed: Working Men in Tomorrow’s Economy
    Author

    Jennifer Rayner

    Jennifer Rayner was born into the aspirational suburbia of the Hawke years, and came of age in the long boom of the Howard era. Her lifetime has tracked alongside the yawning inequalities that have opened up across the Australian community in the past 30 years. She has worked as a federal political adviser, an international youth ambassador in Indonesia and a private sector consultant, and holds a PhD from the Australian National University.

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      Blue Collar Frayed - Jennifer Rayner

      Notes

      INTRODUCTION

      In the food court of an Ipswich shopping centre, between the ubiquitous Donut King and a Chinese buffet, I sat opposite a 50-something man who seemed on the brink of tears or violence. More than 20 minutes into a near-breathless monologue, the big, hunch-shouldered man’s gestures were growing more emphatic, his voice querulous and rising.

      I had taken a long late-afternoon bus ride to this suburban mall to speak with the mechanic-cum-One Nation official about his party’s campaign for a past state election. This was years ago – 2013 – when Pauline Hanson was still the answer to a pub trivia question and not proving that time is a flat circle with her powerful vote in our national parliament.

      From the beginning it was clear my questions were irrelevant. My carefully structured and Ethics Committee–approved questionnaire was nothing in the face of this man’s powerful need to talk.

      He talked about foreign investment, corporate tax-dodging and Australian farmers losing ownership of their land. He talked about overseas-trained mechanics doing cheap and shoddy work that meant clients wouldn’t pay for quality anymore. He talked about the rotating cast of unsettling teens at his local shops, the casual midday destruction done by young guys without shifts or TAFE classes to go to.

      And he talked about others. Others who were getting more. Had more. More than their share. Taking it from people like him.

      I discreetly turned off my recorder. It didn’t seem fair or ethical to record this man’s deep bellow of frustration, his pained and personal broadside at a world whose contours had taken new shape while he’d had his head down, working.

      But I remember with incredible clarity the question that rang through his words and hung in the overly chilled air between us, the query that hurt my head and heart as his baggy eyes held mine: where does someone like me fit, now?

      He was asking if this economy, this society, still had a place for blue-collar blokes. Because frankly, he couldn’t see it. Couldn’t work out where he would be useful and valued in his late years; couldn’t see how the men and boys coming behind him would be able to work, provide, prosper.

      Years on from that afternoon, I look at the jobs numbers rolling in, the long slide in apprentices and the ever-shrinking manual industries, and honestly, I wonder the same thing.

      *

      As I write this in November 2017, Australia’s male workforce participation rate has been hovering around 70 per cent for 22 straight months – the lowest rate on record. That means fully three in 10 men are neither working nor looking for a job. This is lower than at any time during the global financial crisis; it is much lower too than during the early ’90s recession, when hundreds of thousands of Australians lost their jobs.¹

      Once you start scouring the data, it’s not hard to see why that might be. Australia’s manufacturing industry has shed over 33,000 jobs in the last five years alone. Agriculture has lost about 15,200, while the utilities sector is down more than 20,800 jobs. Mining has lost 18,400 positions, with a further 31,000 to 50,000 predicted to go by 2020.² In fact, only one of our male-dominated manual industries has expanded its workforce since 2012. The frenzy of residential property building across Australia’s capital cities has kept construction jobs growing, at least.³

      Over the last five years Australia has also shed over 232,000 apprentices and trainees, taking the number of training workers to its lowest level in 15 years. There were actually more apprentices and trainees on worksites in 2001 than there were in 2016, despite our population having grown by almost 5 million people since that time.⁴

      Before the GFC, the share of men who had been out of work for more than a year was at a 17-year low, averaging just 8 per cent of all unemployed jobseekers throughout 2008. But by 2017 this had jumped up more than five percentage points, with 58,000 additional men out of work for more than a year.⁵

      Good jobs for blue-collar blokes are going, and replacements are getting harder to find. Too many skilled, experienced men are giving up on work altogether as a result, leaving their futures in question and this country with a serious challenge ahead of us.

      I know these blokes. My grandfather, my father, my brother: all men who make a living with their hands. The older two generations were plumbers; my brother is only now training his way into the family trade after a disjointed decade trying to get paid any other way.

      I know bashed-up enamel mugs and muddy work clothes left at the back door, days that start well before sunrise and end with too-brown heads drooping on chests before the evening news is over. I know thoughtful looks and creative solutions that always seem to involve cable ties or a bit of well-placed rag.

      So I know a little, too, about what their work means to these men.

      It means providing for your family and having the chance to build a comfortable life – that’s a given. And as with any work there is the routine, a purpose, the reassurance of full days. But for these men there is also the quiet pride of having mastered a set of valuable and – as any amateur who has tried to DIY a retaining wall or tinker with their own car engine knows – remarkably complex skills; a sense of permanence and continuity when knowledge is passed from boss to apprentice, from one generation to the next.

      There is the satisfaction of making something from a jumble of pieces and parts, or changing a landscape with the work of your hands. Days and weeks that are measured out not in hours but in the metres of pipe laid, rivets welded, tonnes of earth displaced.

      Often, too, there is a sense of belonging: to the trade first learned from your dad in afternoon shadows, to the factory that employs half the men in your street. Shift work and the seasonal peaks and flows of output can create a rhythm entire communities thrum to. If you doubt this is still so, just visit Gladstone when the cargo ships are queued offshore or Traralgon at the change of shifts.

      For blue-collar blokes, work has a meaning and social context that simply isn’t found in many of the other jobs our economy is now creating. However incorrectly, teaching and caring are seen as lacking expertise or art, belonging to the domestic realm of women’s work. Retail and hospitality is what your kids do for video game money, not serious work for grown-ups. Driving is respectable enough but there’s no finished product to stand around at the end of the day, no tidy bit of work that testifies to your skills.

      This is the part too many politicians and policymakers don’t understand. And it’s the reason we’re at risk of going seriously off track in thinking about where these blokes will fit into our economy in the years to come.

      Ask someone in a suit what they think about the loss of blue-collar jobs, and very often you’ll hear the same answer: bit of a shame but not the end of the world because, oh look, there are so many new jobs out there in our fast-growing service sector.

      In some quarters of our capital cities, the loss of these jobs is even viewed as proof that Australia is making progress, becoming a more modern economy, moving beyond the smoke stacks and grime of our industrial past.

      Minister for Social Services Christian Porter exemplified this casual disregard when, in late 2016, he told an Australian Council of Social Service forum:

      The best possible estimates of employment growth show that in one area, that is care – disability care, aged care, child care – there’s going to be 115,000 jobs created over the next several years. So I just don’t put my hands up and say there aren’t enough jobs. I just don’t think that’s statistically the case.⁶

      To quote one of the blokes we’ll meet in a later chapter, Jabba Noonan:

      That’s fucking bullshit. You take a guy who has worked in heavy industry his whole life, expect [him] to take other people’s shit all day? It’s not going to happen. You can’t just slot these guys into service industry roles, the politicians and bureaucrats are absolutely dreaming if they think you can.

      The idea that a late-forties auto worker who has downed tools at Holden can just head off to change dressings at the local aged-care home is as ridiculous as it is troublingly pervasive.

      The suggestion that the blue-collar men being displaced in their tens of thousands by technological and economic change can simply transfer into new jobs in entirely unrelated industries is either an expression of embarrassing ignorance or a conscious bait and switch.

      A small number of these men – the youngest, most adaptable, best educated – may well make that transition. But many, many more won’t: the 20-year veterans of production lines, the migrants with stumbling English, the regional residents of one-company towns.

      The most likely consequence of our current approach to blue-collar jobs is that more and more of these men will drop out of the workforce altogether, discarded and discouraged by an economy that no longer values them or their skills.

      This book is about where and why that is already happening, and what we could do to turn it around – if we decide blue-collar jobs are worth saving. But that’s the first hurdle this whole thing might fall at.

      Because backing and growing industries that can continue to create good jobs for working men starts with believing such industries are valuable. That they have a place in our economy alongside the shiny-glassed financial centres and exporters of en masse education. Perhaps it’s a by-product of existing blue-collar jobs being mechanised and sent offshore, or maybe we’re just in a rush to swap Australia’s sheep-dipped and coal-dusted image for a more cosmopolitan one, but the standing of our blue-collar industries has rarely seemed lower than it is today.

      When my grandfather started out as an apprentice plumber in 1948, Australia was in the middle of a blue-collar boom. The combination of the full-tilt construction of our capital cities, major infrastructure projects like the Snowy Mountains Scheme getting underway and the greedy demand for manufactured goods from an emerging consumer class meant that men with practical skills were in serious demand. Blue-collar work in this

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