Industry groups estimate Australia will need around 116,700 additional construction workers to meet the government’s target of building 1.2 million new homes over five years.
So how did we get here and what are the factors driving the tradie shortage?
I’m an electrician
One of the big problems is youth apprentice wages
They should be eliminated. They do the same work, they should get the same pay as anyone else, and they’re the reason kids pull out of apprenticeships
With residential, and to a lesser extent commercial, kids are treated like shit and used as cheap labour
Young people with brains are still pushed towards university, and even now, the trades still tend to get the leftovers when it comes to young people.
That’s why many big outfits tend to employ slightly older people, many who have tertiary education already. They are there because they are motivated, not because there’s nothing else
But there are only so many of those big employers
It’s also cheaper for unscrupulous companies to hire cheap labour to do the vast majority of the work and have a single tradesperson to sign it off, and plenty of good sparkies won’t be held liable for work that isn’t their own, and rightly so
Thank you for sharing your insights from inside the trades situation. Seems to me there’s a lot of work to be done to clear up the murky parts.
There isn’t one simple answer because it’s a situation that’s more complex than people realise
I think you’re right and it’s been like that for a long time yet look where we are. We need building trades more than ever and we’re still dealing with what sounds like the same problems.
I’ve seen it for three decades now
for decades it was all “go to uni”, now what ? we have way too few people needed to actually keep a country running and medical staff are forever in shortage and we just steal doctors and nurse’s etc from overseas. How is it places like Cuba have so many doctors they export them , even Italy has Cuban doctors (fuck the US for clamping down on that as well).
One of the jobs I did within the education sector was as a careers adviser in a senior high school in a working class area and this was roughly 2 decades ago. We knew then that Uni was not for everyone and encouraged kids to take a ‘gap year’ to try some different jobs, or go to TAFE and do a course related to their interest to see if they liked it and then use that to help them into uni, or do a traineeship to learn skills, get a taste for the working world, get to know themselves a bit better and get a break from the academic routine before making the decision to choose a particular course at uni or elsewhere (amongst other pathways). It wasn’t unusual for kids straight out of school to find uni overwhelming, or that they’d chosen a course they actually didn’t like and had to drop out or find another course. Nowadays it must be even harder considering the cost of university study. Sometimes, it wasn’t the kids that wanted the uni but the parents who wanted the kids to have what they had not been able to, plus status, etc. I’m surprised they’re still saying that kids are being steered towards uni by schools. There are so many choices. I wonder if the system’s worse than it was.
I think the problems with kids and trades is that, as FE mentions in the other comment here, some kids are still not mature enough plus they get paid a pitiful amount, it takes years to get paid a decent wage and are often not treated well. So many times I’ve heard tradesmen say the usual thing of ‘kids don’t want to work these days’ and that having an apprentice was a hassle. It sounds to me that neither the tradespeople nor the apprentices are getting the support they need.
