The death of the male working class

Marcus Cotswell

I was beginning to worry about the absence of Fraser's graphs. I am glad to see normal service has been resumed :-)

Billy Blofeld

Does employment law and fear of being sued make bosses think twice before making a woman redundant?

Wily Trout

Perhaps women are keeping their jobs BECAUSE they earn less.....?

strapworld

Frank Field is, as ever, correct.

Show me the steel works, the mining industry, the fishing industry, our own car industry (not imported foreign owned car plants), train building and related industries, where are our engineering works? Do you realise we led the world in dynamo's who makes them now? We don't!! Where are our Motor bikes our cycles? Where can there be jobs when we do not construct anything snymore?

This Country needs to go back to the future. Recreate industries, but that would need a realisation to take less money in wages both in the boardroom and on the shop floor, an acceptance from unions that less would make sense and build for the future. We created the computer and chip technology where is that now? I am sorry we have ALL been living beyond our means and we all need a reality check.

Time to return, frankly, for the unemployed to be given free ration books instead of cash. For the elderly, I speak as one, to be given free ration books with a greatly reduced pension pot.

Brewers will have to reduce their prices to 1950 levels as will food producers.

Farmers should be allowed to farm freely and thus this Country could return to self sufficiency. Forget about central control from Brussels.

Coal mines should be re-opened and coal fired power stations built. Enough of this global warming nonsense based on dodgy science. Coal fired homes would be good for the economy and create thousands of jobs.

We should re-take our fishing waters and re-create our proud fishing fleets thus creating thousands of jobs and ensuring that Cod and Chips thrive throughout our land!

We should bring in National Service within the armed services for all young people for at least three years to instill discipline and a respect for Quenn and Country and their fellow man.

Professional sport should be banned thus ending the wags and the greed of so many young people.

As a start, in June the budget should announce that ALL public Employees will do a Canadian and everyone will have to accept a paycut of 20% at least!

That sounds quite reasonable!

nonny mouse

So the logical conclusion is that to get men back into work we should encourage more women to stay at home looking after the kids, right? Extra employer NI payments for women should do the trick. They do cost more for NHS and pensions after all.

No, I'm not being serious, before I get flamed.

Barry

Have women benefited disproportionately from the public sector hiring bonanza?

treforus

My late father,brought up in an area of heavy industry before the war ,used to make the point that he thought present day unemployment was remarkably low given the decimation of the old heavy industries that employed most of the male population in the past.

Keyboard and communication skills are now far more necessary than brawn.The future is not encouraging for the male working class.

Naomi Muse

We now have different industries. Skilled workers are now needed and many people worried about the fact that lots of our young people, especially young men, are without work, but they are also without skills.

Despite entreaties to upskill and train to gain etc throughout the Labour years, and worrying forecasts from the CBI and the like, saying that young men, in particular will be unable to find work, nothing was done that made a difference.

Now we have the statistics to prove that the problem is with us and not in the future any more. All the more reason to train young men, in particular, so that they can earn money, feel good about themselves, and be good members of the community too.

@strapworld talks about the public sector 'doing a Canada'and getting pay cuts of 20%. It would make their lives very difficult indeed, but it would make a huge difference to our economy. As people in the real economy - business - have been taking pay cuts for the last two or more years, the budget should show the even-handed pay cuts and pension cuts for the public sector.

David Galea

Science and engineering are the key to reviving male employment. Build more grammar schools.

Ask a working man what bugs him about his job and he'll tell you it's the clueless women who run the HR department making his working life hell.

Are the figures for female employment skewed by the high number of pointless non-jobs offered by the state?

Abolish sociology and psychology, these fradulent disciplines have got to go.

John Lea

Isn't it true to say that, generally speaking, women have more of a flair for the type of pseudo-professions that are now prevalent, i.e. marketing, advertising, events management, PR, copywriting, administration, etc?

Dennis Churchill

Barry's point needs to be dealt with.

Andy Carpark

Barry, Not sure but wouldn't surprise me. I once found a reference in a speech by Harriet Harman (or conceivably Dawn Primarolo) to women comprising 72% of public sector workers. Googling under 'speeches by …' either of these Great She Elephants should track it down sharpish.

Incidentally, I do recommend reading their speeches for perverse edification. They are baroque mistresspieces.

Dennis Churchill

But the West will be a “Knowledge Economy “while Asia makes things...and if we believe that we will believe in Man Made Global Warming and Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction.
The public sector soaks up a disproportionate number of women in its “work” force.Education, Social Services, H.R, the NHS with its Job Share Chief Executives –and all recession proof. The recession ratchet only seems to operate on the private sector.

THX1138

Makes politics look even more out of step with the rest of UK plc doesn't ? Still plenty of jobs for the boys in the cabinet!

anne allan

I think several posters are correct in their analysis of female jobs; too many are governmental non-jobs busily spying on and bossing around those who still do proper, productive work.
Five-a-day, anyone?

Bob Frost

Very much the point that Engels makes in the Condition of the Working Class in England, except it was the Irish pinching all the British Jobs and men were losing employment to both women AND children.

TGF UKIP

The point you choose not to make of course Fraser, is that the group of people who will not be in the slightest concerned about this situation, in fact they'll be rather pleased, is your mate Dave and his loathsome PC crew.

Indeed, the only semblance to an industrial agenda they have is more of the "green" variety which tends to be lighter and more female suited. The daft thing is though that with rocketing shipping rates, a weak sterling and ever-increasing Chinese quality control problems, the argument for re-industrialization has rarely been stronger over the past thirty years.

If there is one group Dave and the Clique are most contemptuous of and hostile to, it is white working class and C2 males - a contempt and hostility which is, of course, returned in spades as the election result bore out.

Now if gay male unemployment were to seriously increase, that would be a different matter for Dave and and the guys.

lawrence greek

strapworld, brilliant, brilliant post.

Nicholas

Look not just at gender but also at age. You will find most blue chip corporates employ few men over 50 who are not in very senior positions or on the board.

This is at a time when they talk of extending the retirement age.

THX1138

What a bunch of old farts you all are... Of course it could just be that women make better workers. Oh those useless public sector jobs teaching our children or tending to our sick, who needs 'em ?

What employer would wants to keep embittered 50 something male timeservers when they could employ more reliable team focused women or keen as mustard young immigrants.. I run a small people focussed biz and I wouldn't employ any of you bitter old sods and I doubt anyone else would either.

As for moaning about the state of British industry ...Yawn! Who cares, we're crap at making things anyway, the Chinese & the Germans do it much better than us.. if we were any good at it, we'd being doing it wouldn't we .. I'll let you into a secret, that's how markets work.

Dimoto

THX1138 - spot on !

The real problem is with the unemployable, uneducated male: unkempt, inarticulate, innumerate, unsocialised, but full of aggression and resentment.
At least the equivalent females are smart(ish), (mostly) behave themselves, can (sort of) talk and express themselves and usually smell better.
We have gradually produced a cohort of monsters, just waiting to be manipulated.

J H Holloway

Barry - I'm sure that the Spectator has covered this. Isn't it the case that under NuLab, about 1.08m jobs were created in the public sector and 950,000 went to women?

As for HR and the like, these box-ticking, rule-repeating 'jobs' are accelerating in number. And HR is dominated by women (+90percent?).

Take the last published report into the Prince of Wales' operation. I noted that he employs about 123 people at Clarence House and Highgrove, yet the Clarence House-based HR department numbers seven people.

That seven HR people (all women, surely?) to cover 116 employees. What better example of the knotweed of invented white collar female jobs?

Aberdeen Angus

THX1138 - "What employer would wants to keep embittered 50 something male timeservers when they could employ more reliable team focused women or keen as mustard young immigrants.. I run a small people focussed biz and I wouldn't employ any of you bitter old sods and I doubt anyone else would either."

Here we see once again the voice of the politically correct is the voice of hatred. Anyone who disagrees with PC (otherwise know as cultural marxist) dogma must be old, lazy and bitter. And of course THX1138 gives the game away as to what lies behind this. Immigrants are more happy to work for low wages, and so for that matter are women. All the nonsense about feminism, anti-racism, open borders etc is simply the demand to open the labour market to more easily expoitable workers disguised as a bogus concern for those same workers.

Speaking of that bogus concern I read the paper that the education section of Freakonomics is based on. Frankly I can't imagine why anyone wanting to promote multiculturalism would want to recommend people read it.

But of course THX1138 does not believe in multiculturalism. Like all cultural marxists (and indeed all marxists) (s)he is motivated by hate. Hence the belief that all posters with unPC views must be middle aged. He wants to think they must be older and therefore nearer death than he. That is the heart of political correctness. Hatred of white people, hatred of men, hatred of the christian believers. THX1138 has displayed all of these in his various posts.

Verity

The tiresome ("Here's a dramatic photo of ME on the ESTATE of the late SIR JIMMY GOLDSMITH" in MEXICO) Number plate informs the world: "I'll let you into a secret, that's how markets work."

Thanks, sweets. We'll keep it in mind. (But please learn punctuation as it is what acts as the traffic police on any language. You should have had a colon after "secret". Otherwise your sentence is gobbledygook.

Elizabeth Foss

I agree dimoto, and we have the same problem here in Australia. It's no use raising school-leaving ages, they don't bother showing up most of the time anyway. Possibly more technical training schools would be of help - any worthwhile course here is quickly filled.

THX1138

Mr Angus - I'll employ who like for my Biz to make a profit and that is mostly women (and i do have one white old male codger working for me and he's whiz with Excel, but he not bitter apart from a rather irrational hatred of Libby Purves ) .

As for embittered old farts, your awful hate filled rant, makes my point wonderfully.

Rhoda Klapp

THX, don't you treat all applicants equally on the basis of age, race, gender, race and religion? Or do you discourage applications from the 'wrong type'. What you have declared here may not be just prejudiced, but illegal.

David Galea

"Of course it could just be that women make better workers. Oh those useless public sector jobs teaching our children or tending to our sick, who needs 'em ?"

Oh please, this is an out of date straw man from 1997. Schools and hospitals, gotta save 'em all! Real jobs ain't the problem. It's the non-jobs with highly paid public sector wages that have got to go.

As for your point about male workers, that's why we need more grammar schools to appeal to the narcissism of young boys, elitist technical schools for the same, and apprenticeships at 14 to catch these boys BEFORE they start learning bad habits such as skipping lessons.

Robert Taggart

Does 'IDS' know about this ? !

RocketDog

THX1138. Speaking as a bitter old sod, I have noticed that once things get particularily uncomfortable in either the public or private sectors, and action has to be taken, it usually falls to a bitter old sod to do it. We have had 13 years of people of all descriptions running about preening themselves and undeservedly enjoying the fruits of what our society has to offer its leaders. Try travelling first class to London on any provincial line and look at the array of senior civil servants, politicos and quangocrats all heading down to the trough at workers playground in Westminster. The Japanese have a saying that the fish rots from the head down. These people are the tip of the public sector iceburg. If we weren't paying for it, it would be hilarious. Ask yourself what use any of them would be at a time of national crisis, or in any sort of a tight corner. Issuing emergency planning consents or setting up shelters conforming to diversity directives from Brussels? We need to revert to traditional values such as common sense as well as traditional industries if we are going to have any chance of getting this country off its knees and back out at the forefront of the world once again. I run a small but perfectly formed business and my problem is tranferring old sods know-how to young minds poisoned by a slack state education system and Big Brother. The bad news for people like you THX1138, is that it really isn't that difficult

libertarian

@strapworld

What a pathetic and ludicrous post. yeh great idea lets go and live in the past and watch us all get creamed by the Chinese and Indians.

On manufacturing, please realise we DO manufacture lots and lots of things in this country ( true under Labour and their stupid employment laws and taxes that shrunk slightly). Please also realise that manufacturing does NOT employ the huge numbers that it did due to new technology, manufacturing and automated processes. So those of you who dream of opening a car plant or steel works that will employ 1,000's of people are living in the past.

In order to create employment free the private sector from taxs and regulations on who they can employ or better yet give tax incentives to employ more people.

Rhoda Klapp

You never get in front of a tribunal by failing to hire a white, straight, middle-aged British bloke of child-bearing age. You can dismiss them first, too.

Dan Grover

So many of you seem to be attacking THX as if they somehow support over-zealous public spending, or are a commie. Au contraire, so far everything they have said has been very pro-market and freedom. It's the people calling for a return to the industrialisation that nearly throttled us in the 70's that are the ones enthusing about a centrally planned economy. Believe it or not, business owners know better than the government what's profitable and what isn't. The role of government shouldn't be to create jobs, it should be to free the private sector so that IT can create jobs.

Token Old Codger

THX1138 isn't such a bad fellow in real life. He's mostly online and rarely visits the office except when accompanied by the other shareholders and VIPs. He employs mostly women graduates, on merit. They happen to be nearly all either Polish or Palestinian. They are all very friendly, polite, speak excellent English and are very reliable. They really look the pick of the bunch and make me feel as old as Moses I can tell you. Also old clever clogs can pay us directly into a Euro or USD account which is so very convenient for me and many of the girls.

Beer Moth

THX 1138

The state of British industry should concern even you. When 'The City' has been containered off to Shanghai, like so many weaving looms and engineering presses (for surely, why would they want to stop at the shit end of the line?); then we in this country will be left wondering how we are going to feed ourselves.

Any ideas?

THX1138

Token Old Codger- I hope you posted that in your lunch break?

Aberdeen Angus

Ok I'll try posting this again. THX wants to able to discriminate against against those he doesn't like but he completely supports the US 1965 civil rights act that stops others from doing so. He thinks people should only be allowed to discrimiate against the people he hates.

He constatly posts hate filled bile against whites, catholics and others and yet when anyone points this out or objects to it in any way they are called hateful. That is the essence of political correctness.

Aberdeen Angus

I'll try posting this once more, see if it appears this time. THX belivies in freedom of association if it is anti-white or anti-male but supports the Civil Rights Act that denies the same freedom of association to others.

THX is happy to post hateful comments about whites, men, catholics and others but when anyone points this out or obejects to this they are labelled hate filled. This kind of hate fuelled double standard is at the heart of political correctness.

Token Old Codger

Note to Boss,

Beefy from Aberdoom has just prompted me to remind you that if you ever hire any squawking gingers then you'll ruin the happy working atmosphere in the office.

Aberdeen Angus

TOC - You're little joke illustrates my point perfectly. You are quite happy to make it but would never make a similar joke using an anagram of 'gingers'. It seems derogatory jokes, like freedom of association, are allowed - but only if they are anti-white. Isn't there a word for having race based double standards.

THX1138

Token Old Codger Indeed Mr Angus from Aberdoom would upset the happy atmosphere in the office with his po-faced Jock ways, and we already have one token white male catholic old codger and that's quiet enough. And can you imagine how miserable he will get when England with the World Cup?

Aberdeen Angus

THX - Well it all sounds very cosy and Old Codger sounds like a good sport. I do wonder though how quickly you might get po-faced if it was some PC protected group being insulted. I suppose as long as the white catholic men in question are good sports about the double stardard that's OK.

Further education tutor / trainer

I don't normally contribute to these conversations but - as I work in further education and training - I would just like to say there is a lot of truth in many of the postings.
1. in my experience, women generally work harder and get better academic results in schools, colleges and universities
2. changing from assessment largely by exams to assessment by various types of coursework seems to have benefitted women who are generally more conscientious and thorough.
3. women tend to have the sorts of skills - including the willingness and ability to learn more skills - that are in demand in increasing numbers of private and public sector jobs. Sadlt, many young men do not.
4. we do alot of mock interviews and women also tend to present themselves better in giving full answers to questions, steering the conversation onto their strengths, and communicating their willingness to train, work flexibly, and to adopt the working culture of the organisation they are trying to join.
I am from Walsall and old enough to recall the days when most men could expect to work in factories; those days will not return. Of course the government should stop giving priority to the City and their friends, and should do everything possible to help and not to hinder productive industries. However people must realise there are very few jobs now for unskilled people, and none for those whose attitude is negative, surly and resentful.

Aberdeen Angus

Further education tutor / trainer - So you think that the male and female genders have different strengths and weaknesses on average. You believe in freedom of association and think that employers should not be forced to operate affermative action in favour on men. I agree with all of that.

Do you also agree that men have certain strengths that affirmative action in favour of women should not be imposed. And what about ethnicity. Do you agree with me that america's anti-freedom of association 1965 Civil Rights Act and britain's anti-freedom of association 1976 Race Relations Act should be repealed.

You speak about womens strengths, would you be willing to say what you think about the strengths and weaknesses of various ethnic groups.

If THX wants to discriminate against white men he should be free to do so, if he thinks such discimination is justified. The trouble is he has said on a previous thread that he supports the Civil Rights Act, specificly concerning its provisions on freedom of association. So he thinks race and sex discrimination should only be allowed if it is anti-white and anti-male. That is a racial double standard and that is therefore racism.