Men’s sheds.

In one generation the world has seen a technological revolution. The average kitchen, where our mothers and grandmothers would have aspired to have a fridge and an electric washing machine, now has scores of computers built into the microwave, the dishwasher, the washing machine, the fridge, the cooker and endless gadgets we all take for granted. We expect supermarket or shopping mall doors it to open for us automatically. The people on the checkout no longer have to figure out the change or stock levels, the computerised system automatically does all that for them. Even the family car now has an onboard computer silently waiting to tell the garage mechanic what happened to it and what it needs. Car factories are now run by robots, which build the cars and deliver them at the Out Door all perfectly shiny and quality tested. Warehouses serving shops now have robots stacking shelves and sorting deliveries ready for a driver to take to the customer or to retail outlets.
All of this was achieved by people working hard in Silicon Valley USA and in the M4 corridor in the UK, and like the builders who put up St Paul’s Cathedral they are mostly now out of work and kicking their heels or playing games on home PCs. Their enterprise and ingenuity made our lives better and safer but they put many people out of work and have now found themselves out of work.

The last decade has shown growth only in government; obviously unsustainable when so many of those who paid for them in taxes are now out of work or in part time or low paid jobs. The service industry is the only one left, trucking, transporting goods made by robots, selling buying and marketing goods. These are mostly jobs for presentable young women, leaving young men and middle aged people scrabbling around looking for any bit of income they can by any means, all now unable to afford to reskill and retrain for a new career. I.T. specialists can be plumbers but that costs £8000 per annum for each certificate upgrade unless you can claim to have done them cheaper abroad. They need to get together and make things happen together instead of sitting around worrying, lost, broke, bored and lonely.

In Australia they have a problem that had a completely different cause but the same outcome and they have come up with the idea of Men’s Sheds. Women tend to organise themselves more readily than men. Men of all ages seem to need a push to do it. Men’s Sheds are what you would expect of a men’s shed – wooden floors, benches, tools, dust, mugs of tea and only what they have made to sit on. Each has an attendance rate of around 50 men a day dropping in to learn of job news, to exchange ideas and to make things. There are woodworking lessons and other trades to be tried and learned in the shed. Marketable qualifications to be aimed for and relationships to be established.

Here we have Working Men’s Clubs often with little more than a bar and a pool table open on set evenings during the week.
These need to evolve!