By Lexi Cottee
The Victorian Parliamentary Library will fund a study into the demise of the car industry.
A team of academics from the Australian Catholic University (ACU) will compare the aftershocks caused by the closure of automotive industries in Melbourne, Geelong and Detroit.
The project is part of a comparative analysis that will look into what happens after “de-industrialisation” in Australia and the United States.
The ACU academics will work alongside researchers from Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan.
Melbourne-based Dr Joshua Roose is one of three ACU researchers on the team.
He said the group would start interviewing supply chain manufacturers this month to assess the impact Ford’s closure will have on individual employees and their families.
As a political scientist, his role is to analyse the role played by the automotive industry on multiculturalism.
“For generations, Ford and Holden have employed migrants whose skillsets were not easily transferable in Australia,” Dr Roose said.
“They could move up the chain, and this acted as a form of immigration and assisted with multiculturalism in the outer suburbs.”
He said the research would focus on the trajectory of former automotive employees and the impact of their redundancies on their lives.
“Are they finding new jobs or moving into precarious casual labour, such as labour-hire firms?
“Where has the money gone that was ear- marked to retrain them and stimulate these local economies?
“What’s the impact of federal government policies on real people?” Dr Roose will ask.
