ABSTRACT
Delineating the lives of ex-textile workers – Pakistani men now in their sixties – who met an unexpected transition when textiles collapsed, from relatively well-paid, secure jobs to unemployment and precarious self-employment in local service industries such as taxi driving, retail and catering, the study explored with the men the consequences for family formation and the impact on their son’s upbringing. Of particular note was their fathers were often absent, unable to offer close supervision of their son’s lives due to the nature of shift work, antisocial hours, and exploitative and poorly paid work they were forced to carry out even as they materially provided for their extended families, who also provided support in a more general communal upbringing of children. Absent parenting joined high educational aspirations. Nevertheless, the men related being abandoned upon becoming unemployed, diminishing unemployment benefits and denied any meaningful retraining. Abandoned and thrown into poverty and insecurity with young children and a wife to support, some found self-employment, while others never worked again. The men were explicit about what they saw as the main cause of their woes in Thatcherite outsourcing and deindustrialisation, as the local textile industry moved abroad in search of cheaper labour and newer capital investment. Often, they felt that their children had been abandoned too without a future.
