Women bore the brunt of job losses in the opening phase of Australia’s first recession in 30 years, but the shadow minister for the future of work, Clare O’Neil, will warn on Monday there is “a tsunami coming for workers in predominantly male industries”.
O’Neil will use a speech on Monday to point to the vulnerabilities of particular cohorts of male workers as the recession moves from the “artificial” phase of government-imposed shutdowns to the “organic phase” of sustained downturn.
The Labor frontbencher will draw on research from McKinsey to note some of the hardest hit industries running into March next year will be construction, where 88% of the workforce is male, manufacturing (73% male-dominated) and professional services (57% male-dominated in the legal and consulting professions).
O’Neil says McKinsey estimates that when jobkeeper and jobseeker payments are withdrawn, just under half a million jobs will be lost, and she says analysis she has undertaken indicates more than 60% of the jobs will be lost by men.
She notes the gender switch, with male employment now being harder hit than female employment, is already manifesting in labour market statistics, with the male unemployment rate now at 7.14% compared to female 6.71%. “Male unemployment has risen more than female unemployment during the Covid period,” she will say.
O’Neil will also note that more men than women are leaving the labour market.
She says jobs traditionally performed by men are more at risk during the structural change that accompanies recessions – change like offshoring, automation and outsourcing.
Qantas, O’Neil says, is a case in point. “Despite having received $800m from the Australian taxpayer, the company has decided to permanently shed 6,000 workers.”
She says part of that shift is outsourcing ground crews, which are predominately male.
O’Neil on Monday will release new data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics tracking participation trends by male workers in the labour market.
“According to the ABS, the participation rate of men of working age who did not complete a post-school qualification fell from 83.4% in 1994 to 73.6% in 2019 – what this tells us is that for this group, one-in-four are not in the labour force at all, and that this dropped by 10 points over about 20 years,” she will say.
“In 1994, of those employed in this group, 94% were in full time work. But by 2019, only 73% were working full-time.”
She says for many men, those falls occurred over the past five years. “For men with a Certificate I or II qualification, their share of full-time employment dropped from 82% to 77% just in the last five years.”
“These dramatic falls all happened in a growing economy,” O’Neil will say. “I shudder to think what will happen to those men now that the economy is going backwards and wage subsidies are about to be removed, just when they are most urgently needed.”
O’Neil will argue while there is an open dialogue in Australia about what is needed to boost women’s participation in the labour market and improve their job readiness, “the discussion about issues affecting men feels truly fraught”.
She points to a palpable division in the labour market between the “masters of the universe” – highly educated men who reside in urban areas, and men with less education and fewer opportunities.
O’Neil will argue Australia needs a more open conversation in policy terms about what happens during periods of structural adjustment. She says one of the problems to confront is with men who are not getting the support they need to finish school, or go beyond.
“This is not a small problem: millions of men in the workforce today are in this situation.
“Right before the pandemic over 400,000 of these men couldn’t get the hours they need or couldn’t get a job at all – that’s an under-utilised group of men about the size of the population of Canberra.”
She says some men outside the masters of the universe cohort are “thriving, flourishing, and highly skilled via long years of on-the-job training” but on average men with lesser skills and qualifications are experiencing a period of protracted economic decline.
“It is absolutely the case that a group of economically and socially privileged men are the big winners in the future of work,” O’Neil will say. “But for many Australian men, things are going backwards and the public discussion just doesn’t reflect their reality.”
“I worry because if we don’t do a really good job at expressing these concerns in politics, more Australian men and women will look to the fringes – to political shysters like One Nation – for that conversation, and that’s terribly, terribly bad for our country.”
