this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2023
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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.