The grim future awaiting our boys

In this piece I want to start with the auto industry, widen the discussion, and then look at the implications.

Losing jobs in the auto industry

In the last two weeks we have seen the end of auto manufacturing in this country. A Sydney Herald piece cited the words of one worker:

"Ford, Toyota, Holden ..." sighed one auto worker recently, sunken-eyed, on the morning of his last-ever shift. "It's all gone now ... the whole thing ..."

In the same article Nick Toscano and Eryk Bagshaw wrote:

In just 12 months, Ford closed down its factories in Broadmeadows and Geelong, Toyota ceased production in Altona, Holden stopped making the Cruze, and shuttered its Port Melbourne engine plant. And on Friday Holden, the company that began on Beehive Corner, the last Australian car-maker, will complete its exit from manufacturing.

As any thinking person knows, this means the loss of many jobs for ordinary people. Certainly, some are jobs for ordinary working-class women, but it seems that it's more of a male-heavy industry, along with all the jobs associated with making cars and all their parts. And those jobs have gone, perhaps forever.

But is this the whole picture?

Steel-making

Let's turn to steel-making. Gazing out at the BlueScope Steel works at Port Kembla, a friend said "That's where thousands of guys used to work". BlueScope now employs just 3,000 at Port Kembla directly (and 9,000 indirectly), according to a BlueScope corporate spokesman. That's a far cry from the thousands who once worked in the Illawarra. When I taught in South Coast schools, many a kid sneered at teachers, saying "I'm going to get twice what you get when I join the steelworks". The area hummed with industry and you could hear a hundred different accents and languages in the street. Those days are gone.

Merchant navy

Take another industry: our merchant navy. As someone said recently in the Sydney Morning Herald, we used to have a large merchant navy. Alas, no more. We don't insist on using national carriers as many other countries do (the US for instance, with its Jones Act). We, too, should insist that merchant ships are nationally owned and operated. Who does our government care about? Not Australian workers, for sure. The politicians' mantra of 'more jobs' usually turns out to be a phantom, just as it will be if the dreaded Adani mine ever opens.

Education - not good for males.

If we turn to education, we look at yet another area hostile to males. Girls, we hear, do better and better at university, and there are growing numbers of female graduates and thus lawyers and other highly-educated professionals. Where are all the men, asked one UK newspaper about university entrants. Asked to comment on this, I heard a union spokesperson say "Things are moving in the right direction". Presumably things won't be right until male students are reduced to a tiny rump. Of course, job prospects for girls aren't unproblematic, though the 'gender gap' might need to be addressed sometime.

Teaching is another job that used to be a good career for working-class and lower middle-class men. No more. It's rare to find men in teaching, especially in primary schools. State primary schools are the most male-free. You can't raise a family on a teacher's wage, it's said. Stories abound of prospective teachers being told "We need someone to lift the heavy boxes and look after the little bastards". Male teachers are asked "Mary's finding this one a bit hard to manage, so can you take him in your class?" Research confirms the truth of these stories. Male teachers in primary schools will not just be an endangered species. They will be extinct, a researcher says. Teaching is yet another job which has been casualised. Another good job for men is gone.

Technical and Further Education has been hit by one disaster after another. In a stroke of genius – well, perhaps they thought it was genius - the Gillard Government created the Vet-FEE-HELP scheme. This was a brilliant opportunity- if you were some money-grubbing person clever at setting up dummy colleges designed to grab government funds and offer dodgy diplomas. Since then studies have shown that TAFE has been denied of funds, fewer and fewer good jobs have been created, and large amounts of money have seeped into the hands of various doubtfully qualified people. Warnings were issued as early as 2012- but nothing was done to stop the rorts. And technical education trains all those typically male jobs - like electrician, plumber, gardener, technician - that appeal to working-class boys.

Implications for boys

The future for boys is grim. Years ago, an article named jobs that were employing fewer people. They included ship-building, steel-making, munitions, clothes manufacturing and shoe-making: all male-heavy jobs. We could have added jobs like banking- another industry offering far worse employment prospects today compared to 1970 or 1980. Meantime, jobs like childcare, beauty therapy and care giving have been rising in demand. All are female-heavy jobs. And work everywhere has been casualised: far worse working conditions, worse sick leave and holiday pay, if any. Sally McManus pointed this out last week. No wonder they call her a dangerous radical. These worrisome trends have accelerated in the last twenty years. So the future for boys is bleak.

Not for all boys. Walk around Central Station in Sydney and look at the boys in smart uniforms. Many Asian faces will brush past you as they scurry off to well-financed schools. Some are selective schools; some are private schools. But these boys will do well. Life has shown them many favours. Well-paid jobs and good careers await. One could ask why Australians tolerate such a large proportion of foreign-born students in well-financed schools, while the problem kids are usually bundled off to poorer State schools, but of course that might be racist.

This leaves working-class Australian boys. For some time we've known that certain groups of boys have been facing a tough future. Dark-skinned boys threaten established routines; they are very visible and are easily targeted by teachers and police. Some of the Africans face particular issues, as portrayed in SBS-TV's excellent show "Sunshine" . (Perhaps they are fortunate not to be in the USA, in a country where black men face far more problems, as I've explained in an earlier article.)

White working class boys are also in trouble. So many good jobs lost: and so many jobs are offering just casual or part-time labour. How can a young male do what his dad and his grand-dad did: meet a nice girl, buy a house and yard with a bit of room to move, and raise a growing family? In Sydney or Melbourne, with median house prices over a million dollars? Impossible, unless New Zealand's new Prime Minister brings her foreign ownership rules over here and house prices fall to levels ordinary people can manage.

The media don't help much with all this. They follow their own agendas. I've written before about how much people in the media like writing about themselves and riding their own hobby-horses. Commercial media are a lost cause with endless trivialities. Meantime the ABC seems obsessed with being 'more diverse' (as usual, this means giving more attention to women and some favoured ethnic groups, rather than anything else). SBS might be forgiven for following their charter and highlighting ethnicity, though some ethnic groups are more equal than others. In all this, there's not much attention given to the problems of unfashionable working-class Australian boys. Yes, boys can be loud, boisterous, noisy and rude, as teachers tell me. But they – with girls- are our hope.

A grim future for boys

Now put all of the above together. What is the future for most boys, if those steady jobs like steel-making are in strong decline? Where are the good sound jobs for ordinary decent young Australian males? Why isn't there an outpouring of popular feeling for them? Why is the academic world so hostile to boys as a race of individuals? Do a search on "boys' education" and look at the astounding number of articles determined not to help boys to learn. Even the idea of boy-friendly teaching seems to offend many academics.

The future for many boys is bleak. It will mean more trouble: on the street; in workplaces; in hospitals and other institutions, where frustrated boys will lash out; and in our schools. More men shut out of post-school education. More men in jail. And nobody gives a damn.