If you need a skilled workforce, invest in your staff!
BUILDING firms are again reporting that a lack of skilled trades is holding back projects, and insurer Direct Line for Business says only seven per cent of new apprenticeships are in construction. Those of us working in the industry know that a career in any building trade is unattractive, and the companies themselves are largely to blame because they don’t invest in people. Instead of employing people directly, they use agencies. The delivery man who brought me a parcel the other day was a time-served joiner who’d simply had enough. In his late 40s, he should have been a tradesman in his prime, but is now doing something else for a living. At 15 in 1966, I began a five-year apprenticeship as an electrician with a local company. They carried as many apprentices as qualified electricians and sent me to college one day a week for five years. I passed my exams and at the end of my apprenticeship got my trade card. The electrical contracting industry was well organised by the Joint Industry Board. Wages and conditions were set a few years in advance. If you changed employers, your working benefits went with you. The few employment agencies that existed paid above the normal rate to compensate for the lack of holiday pay, overtime rates and expenses. If a company liked an agency worker, it would offer them a job. Ten years ago companies started hiring agency labour, mainly to avoid paying for the health and safety courses that dominate the workplace today. They ask the agency for tradesmen who have been on this or that course: if you hadn’t done the course, you didn’t get the job. Now, it’s the workers who have to take time off work and pay for these courses, and repeat them a few years later. Electricians must also take and pass academic courses, costing £1,000 and requiring a week off work. Meanwhile, the agencies now pay less than directly employed wages, with no benefits, and charge you up to £20 a week just to be paid through a third party. They are little short of parasites. At 65, I’m still working, but I’d had enough years ago. Many mature tradesmen are retiring earlier, disillusioned with work and unable to afford the courses they need to take. It’s time the building trades were treated as something other than a cash cow to be regularly milked. Industry should be paying for all the courses needed to get a job. Employment agencies should pay the equivalent in pay and benefits of a directly employed person. Construction companies should start investing in people again.
WALTER SMITHWHITE, South Shields, Tyne & Wear.