Skills training for Ontario’s workforce

Ontario Premier Doug Ford has apparently been catching up on his reading.

In 2006, Matthew B. Crawford, a motorcycle mechanic with a doctorate in political philosophy, wrote an essay in the New Atlantis on the merits of skilled manual labour.

When Crawford published a book on the matter a few years later, “Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work,” it became a sleeper hit. He had struck a nerve, tapping into widespread misgivings about our culture’s separation of thinking from doing, about the presumption that only white-collar work qualified for the “knowledge” economy.

In a trend that had been noted since at least the mid-1980s, education systems seemed bent, Crawford said, on preparing students to become “knowledge” workers in the post-industrial economy, rather than developing practical skills that required the understanding and mastery of how things worked.

The trades were looked down on. High-school shop classes were disappearing, even as the skilled workers earned handsome livings while enjoying the satisfaction and self-esteem that comes from competence. Such workers have no need to offer “chattering interpretations” of themselves to vindicate their worth, Crawford wrote. They “can simply point: the building stands, the car now runs, the lights are on.”

As part of a political realignment that has occurred across North America over the last half century, conservative governments such as Ford’s Progressive Conservative administration in Ontario have forged alliances with and won support from working-class voters and the unions that represent skilled trades.

And the effort continues.

Labour Minister Monte McNaughton has been rolling out some intriguing policy, proposing to clean up work sites, modernizing them by requiring women-only facilities, fining employers who withhold workers passports, and, interestingly, allow high-school students early entry into trade schools.

Under his proposal, students will be able to leave school in Grade 11 for full-time trade apprenticeships while still acquiring a highschool diploma.

Ford called it “a game changer” that will help more students enter the skilled trades faster, qualifying for well-paid jobs that are in high demand.

Ontario currently has an acute shortage of workers. More than 70,000 workers will be needed in the next four years in construction alone. By 2026, one in five jobs will be in the skilled trade, Ford said.

For the premier, such initiatives serve a political and economic purpose, while also sketching the broad outlines of a labour plan that, if delivered, could stand as a legacy achievement.

Still, on this file, there is plenty of cause to be cautious. Numerous supports and benefits that would help vulnerable workers most — including joint liability for temporary-worker injuries, minimumwage hikes and permanent paid sick days — were rolled back by Ford’s government and have not been reinstated.

Trades training is likely motivated by a desire to court the traditional “blue-collar” sector of white, male workers, while the province’s most vulnerable workers — typically racialized women — remain mired in more precarious, nonunion jobs.

As we have argued, the single biggest thing government would do to improve life for labour would be to make it easier to unionize.

And as the Star noted this week, the number of inspections to identify overall workplace violations such as wage theft has dropped significantly, from 3,500 in 2017 to 215 last year. The number of prosecutions for employment standards violations are also down.

So, the job is far from finished.

As Matthew Crawford put it 15 years ago, “craftsmanship means dwelling on a task for a long time and going deeply into it, because you want to get it right.”

The same applies to the craft of government.

Under the proposal, students will be able to leave school in Grade 11 for full-time trade apprenticeships while still acquiring a high-school diploma