Sting, formerly the lead singer of The Police, was recently interviewed in the Guardian about his new musical, The Last Ship. The show is about the social tragedy that befalls a shipbuilding community when the industry leaves, and there are no more ships to build.

The singer, who grew up in one such community in Wallsend in the north of England, aims to make a social statement about the effects of deindustrialisation, specifically on men, when manual jobs dry up. “I don’t have any answers,” he told the newspaper. “But maybe the toxicity in society at the moment is [a result of the fact] that we’ve lost that direction for our energy, that male strength.”

This can be a touchy subject, and it would probably be best for everyone to retire the phrase “toxic masculinity”, which can come off as an epithet used to blame working-class men for their lack of economic prospects. Nonetheless, in broad strokes, he’s right.

Way back in the late Eighties, civil rights leader Bayard Rustin warned about what might happen in the transition away from industrial work toward the vaunted “service economy”. He predicted that those workers who had nothing to sell but their brawn would never again be able to “use muscle power as an upward mobility” as so many generations of working-class men had in decades past.

That’s precisely what happened. As deindustrialisation destroyed high-wage jobs, and along with them the trade-union movement, it trapped working-class men in an economy of low and stagnant wages; or worse, it sent them into a spiral of addiction and despair. Consider, according to a 2018 report, “the share of good [living wage] jobs for workers without a bachelor’s degree declined from about 60% of workers in 1991 to 45% in 2015.” And the downward slide has only continued since then. Overall, blue-collar jobs have simply disappeared, down 30% since the Nineties.

The toll this has taken on working-class men has been staggering, yet it has remained largely invisible to professional-class observers and the wider media. Consider that, since 1979, college-educated workers have seen their wages steadily, if unevenly, increase — up 20% for college-educated men and 38% for their female peers. The same can’t be said for non-college-educated workers whose wages stagnated over this period. Working-class women, for instance, experienced a measly 4% wage growth. But the story is much worse for working-class men, whose earnings have actually decreased by 10-18%.

For those with nothing but sweat to sell, it’s become increasingly difficult to earn a living. That has had profound social effects downstream. It means working-class men have more fraught romantic and social lives; non-college-educated males have the highest rate of loneliness. As a result, family life has become more elusive for these men. These failings compound, too, as chronic unemployment is not a dignified condition. Self-esteem erodes. And in a society where success is measured by consumption, being broke, idle and alone is a recipe for resentment. In fact, it’s the fuel that powers all those “Manosphere” types whose brand of cartoonish, perverted masculinity represents a visceral attempt at imposing some form of male self-worth under economic conditions that have made muscle power, and the men who relied on it, redundant.

It doesn’t take some essentialising theory of masculine virtue to accept the basic fact that blue-collar men have been hit hardest by the transition to a “knowledge economy”, which has obliterated good manual jobs. Similarly, we don’t need an economic policy that sends women “back to the kitchen” or any other policy of cultural backwardness to fix these problems. A jobs-first trade agenda, robust industrial policies, and generational investments in infrastructure could go a long way to bringing back family-sustaining wages for men and revitalising the labour movement. These might even be the answer to our toxic politics.