Skilled labour key driver of economy
Well- trained blue- collar workers are needed more than ever by employers
Bill Gawley recalls his teachers telling him to avoid the trades, go to university and get an office job if he wanted a decent career with good pay.
“The trades were for people who really couldn’t think, people who couldn’t handle what they considered to be the real world of academia,” he says.
Gawley was ready to take their advice.
But when his dad became ill, he became a wage earner for the family and got a job on Chrysler’s production line in Windsor, Ont., in 1977.
Twelve years later, he was accepted into an electrician’s apprenticeship with Chrysler and has remained with the company in the same city ever since.
The automaker continued to need Gawley’s talents, despite downturns in the automotive sector over the succeeding decades.
“For the most part, trades in Windsor — the in- plant people — are doing very nicely,” says Gawley, 55, who makes about $ 40 an hour, enjoys a robust benefits package and has a pension plan that will make retirement for him quite comfortable.
Many people have been steered away from the trades by their teachers, parents or both. It is perhaps a big reason why a recent survey by international staffing firm ManpowerGroup found skilled trades jobs to be the most difficult to fill by Canadian employers.
“Parents would not drive their kids into a skilled- trades area because they’re making the assumption that it’s a tough career, that it could be unsafe,” says Byrne Luft, vice- president of operations for Manpower Canada. “But what they don’t understand is that skilled trades look very different today. It is much safer ... [ and] the money you can make in skilled trades in phenomenal.”
Dwayne Avery, 40, has enjoyed a career as a millwright that started in Calgary in the mid- 1990s, led him to St. John’s and Halifax, and eventually took him back to his hometown of Corner Brook, N. L.
He’s making $ 30 an hour at a pulpandpaper mill run by Kruger Inc., but is considering a move to an offshore oil rig that could pay him triple that amount. “I could probably have 10 different jobs within 30 minutes if I left here,” Avery says.
Benjamin Tal, deputy chief economist for CIBC World Markets, says the shortage of skilled labourers is poised to be the most significant problem in Canada’s labour market in the coming years, and is already a concern.
Tal says the shortage ultimately prevents the economy and companies from reaching their potential.
“The speed limit of this economy will be reduced, and that will impact the standard of living for everybody.”
Gawley says the value of trades needs to be promoted at the high school level. “As a society, we’re really going to have to put a marketing strategy ... together to get people into the trades.”