Who are the "guys" here in this sentence. And what is "a whole line of work"?

I am writing down the previous sentence so that you can understand what it is about.


His experiment of building a small local government from the bottom up, relying on that one feature of Somali society that has bedeviled just about all national governance efforts to date — the clan — may have wider implications for the rest of the country, which seems to export trouble, most recently in the form of pirates.

“I’d take these guys on, but I can’t right now because I don’t have the resources,” Mr. Aden said. “Besides, you can’t just wipe out a whole line of work for thousands of young men. If you take something away, you must replace it with something else.”
Pirates, and piracy.

Perhaps this would have read better without the paragraph break.
Apparently, "guys" refers to the "clan." "A whole line of work" refers to the work provided by the clan to "thousands of young men." In other words, he is using the clans to help him because he is currently in no position to dismantle the clan system.
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