One of the bigger problems is the failure of the construction industry as a whole. Compared to many other jobs, typical home builder trades (carpenter, roofer, brick layer) aren’t competitive with white collar jobs.
-The hours through the summer are awful, with 16+ hour days being the norm. Then you hit the winter and are laid off and have to go on EI. If you’re not good at budgeting, that swing can fuck up your finances.
-Work is physically demanding and often leaves you going home, eating, and sleeping to repeat the next day
-Pay is highly dependent on your company. Many only offer you an hourly rate while on site and working. Commuting (which can vary from a half hour to 2+hrs each way per day) is either on your own dime or at a discounted “travel” rate.
-Often people have a hard time starting an apprenticeship even if they’re great workers with the education requirement done. The boss won’t fill out the paperwork and actually teach the stuff they’re supposed to, just using them as cheap/subsidized grunt labour.
-Bosses and the culture is awful. There are likely those who don’t mind it, and there are companies which are better, but by and large my experience with various trades is highly misogynistic, dashes of racism, and lots or brash yelling instead of actual instruction. Communication is awful, and new workers are treated like shit to “earn their way in”/“do their time”.
So it’s hardly a surprise when there’s less interest in trades/manual labour, especially when the pay is good, but not great.
I hate the “turn to the government”/why didn’t anyone foresee this and subsidize the training that these articles often have. Sure, a portion of it is that. But a larger portion is the last 30 years of “Go to University to get a good job” that parents and schools have been pushing, plus a general unwillingness of the construction industry to improve their culture or increase wages to attract good workers/talent.
I’m always amazed at how rarely the “go to uni and get a good job” angle is brought up in relation to our failing foundational industries in the west. We’ve been incentivizing people to focus on “escaping” the working class, rather than trying to find ways to make those jobs more appealing.
I work in healthcare. Treating student practitioners badly is the norm in a ton of places in this field. 60 hour work weeks are normalized, and wanting a good work-life balance gets you ostracized.
The worst part is that I had to compete to get into this job that treats me badly. My program only takes the top 20 applicants out of hundreds per year. The schooling is brutal, with midterm or final exams 2-3 times a week. This is possible because you are blowing through courses consecutively rather than in a semesterized system. Once you get to practical placement, you are treated like the workplace bitch, and you’re expected to do 2-3x the work of a paid worker for free. Actually, you’re paying tuition to be there, so it’s even worse.
Don’t get me wrong, some of the brutality is necessary. The rapid pace of learning makes it hard to forget anything. It’s a great way to pack knowledge into the brain. But I would never recommend my program to anyone. It was a horrible experience overall. My job is pretty great minus the ridiculous hours, so I’m glad I went. But if I could go back and tell my younger self to do something else, I would.
Maybe that angle became the norm because the working class jobs were turned to shit over time via union busting among other things. I don’t think nearly as many would be thinking about university if many if not most working class jobs weren’t seen as precarious. Heck even a ton of white collar jobs that require university degrees are precarious now. This is not to detract from your point that we need to improve the conditions of these jobs, just to put the blame where I think it belongs and therefore where the solutions lie.
Great summary of the industry. My family ran a small time contracting business, nothing major and our budgets was in the thousands rather than the tens or hundreds of thousands.
I learned a little bit of every trade and over the years we got connected with bigger companies and we could see just how terrible it was to work for them. They workers there always bragged about the money they made … but if you spent time with them, you quickly figured out that their high paying job was temporary and they would go into long periods of low pay or no pay at all.
A saying I learned from one of the old timers is …
‘They hire us from the neck down’ … they don’t want thinking workers or anyone to talk back, just put your head down, don’t disagree and do the work. If you don’t, they’ll make your life miserable … if you complain some more, they’ll you let go, taken off, no longer needed or just fired.
I decided never to join any of these companies. I just did small time work for myself, small projects and made money only for myself. Keeping a low profile for almost 30 years and now I own multiple small properties and I have no debt. I’m not wealthy but I own everything I have.
If you own multiple properties, I’m pretty sure 95% of people would say you’re wealthy. Good for you and all, but that just doesn’t click with, “I’m not wealthy.”
The inability of gov’ts to foresee and act upon basic lack-of-housing data - which has been available for decades - gives me little hope anything will change … no matter who is in power.
When we accept refugees (which is a good thing) then force them to live on the street because of a lack of afforable housing, we are as evil as the nations they are escaping from.
Gov’ts are filled with stupid, myopic politicians who only care about their own power. It’s time to change the formula for how we elect good people to office.
We are literally starring at the brink of the 2nd middle ages where the rich held all the lands and all the power and the rest are just serfs. And we are all powerless to do something about it.
I mean governments have various things they can do. Push hard on cities that are blocking construction through obstruction or sloth. Prioritize tradesmen as immigrants. Use the powers of the federal government to create a national vacant unit registry so that lower tiers of government don’t have to run vacant unit taxes on the honour system. Allow single-stair multi-unit dwellings. Fund rental construction like they did before Chretien/Martin. Reduce the requirements to get your trade papers (apprenticeships are good but 5 years before your electrician papers seriously???)
It’s just that governments would rather argue about bullshit. Ford is focused on the fucking Ontario Place spa. Poilievre and Postmedia are flinging shit about bail reform. The CBC is, as ever, up its own ass about complete obscure nonsense. Trudeau is a fountain of empty nothings, as he has been since he lost Gerry Butts. Jagmeet is talking about the housing issue, but only in ways to throw more money at buyers and renters to juice demand in a supply-side shortage, which is basically subsidizing landlords.
The time to worry about recruiting and training young tradies was about a decade ago. You can’t make a bunch of kids into 10+ year skilled journeymen in 3 or 4 years, and unless employers are forced they’re going to continue fighting over the most experienced employees and leave the apprentices to rot without an opportunity to be trained.
Industry and government should have taken this seriously when it was brought up years ago that there was a big generation drop-off in most trades, but it looks like someone tossed that mess down the later-tube and now, it’s later. They should have been mandating mandatory apprentice ratios in workplaces years ago, instead of letting apprentices be used as labour and then fail their exams due to not being taught their trade.
“The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second-best time is today.”
We can import TFWs though.
Just starting an electrical apprenticeship in a couple weeks. I’m very interested to see how this plays out. Seems to me like there’s a lot of complaints on both sides between “nobody wants to hire apprentices” and “nobody wants to work anymore”. From my experience in hospitality, I feel like there’s a feedback loop of people don’t want to invest in real training because they feel those staff are just going to move on and staff keep moving on because there’s no room for advancement within an employer so they have to jump somewhere else to get ahead. I imagine a similar thing happens lots of other industries.
Which kind of mandatory apprentice ratios are you thinking of? Many trades have a cap so you can’t hire more apprentices without first bringing in more journey persons to train them. If you mean the other way where a place would actually have to be bringing in apprentices, I don’t think that’s practical unless you can perpetually grow your business exponentially as those apprentices are being trained.
Sounds like the big problem with construction is that the cyclical nature of construction makes the jobs completely unviable in the winter.
Is there any way to make construction in the winter more appealing/feasible?
There really isn’t. We build through the winter in Winnipeg and it’s miserable. A union carpenter can make 100k with a bit of overtime though so some guys will keep signing up…but not enough of them.
Houses are going for millions. Skilled trades are in short supply. The message for tradies should be loud and clear: raise your prices. Whatever you’re being paid, it’s not enough. Everybody else is gouging in this shortage, you should too. Get that bag.
