Perhaps it is the glamour that swirls around jobs in the information technology industry but one of the basic trades of yesteryear is not attracting apprentices. New South Wales is desperately short of bricklayers. We are going through a boom in new house building and this lack of tradespeople is both slowing completions - and sending prices through the roof.
A good bricklayer can lay about fifteen hundred bricks a day and on most jobs the rate of pay is on the basis of a rate per brick. A year ago the going rate was eighty five cents a brick, but now demand is so strong that desperate people have raised this to as much as a dollar ninety per brick laid. It is not uncommon for top tradesmen to work a four day week and earn $ 6,000.
Bricklaying is definitely a young persons job. It is physically fatiguing and the worker is exposed to the full range of weather conditions and often work is at heights on scaffolding that presents the ever likely risk of falls. It is a highly skilled trade and it is noted for a sharp drop out rate for those who do enter apprenticeships.
Many older bricklayers avoid new home construction and concentrate on renovation work. The average age of existing housing stock ranges between twenty-five and thirty-five years old and the bricklaying involved is both smaller - and requires skill to blend with existing patterns. The older bricklayer who specialises on this growing market has the advantage of quoting it as "piecework " and can virtually name his own price.
This is becoming a worry to the brick manufacturing industry. The shortage of bricklayers and the ever rising price of getting a job done is causing the home industry to avoid bricks in favour of other types of building materials - which are cheaper and quicker to erect. There is a defining trend to replace bricks with pre-cast concrete slabs in commercial construction and architects are following this trend in house design.
Young people under twenty-five figure sharply in the unemployment statistics and these are the very people who would be most suited to fill this growing gap. For some strange reason, bricklaying does not seem to feature in trade promotion to school leavers. The career advisers seem infatuated with the cyber world and are eager to push jobs in the technology industry, but ignore the basics which were the bread and butter of the workforce in past decades.
All this amounts to that golden word - opportunity ! The holy grail for any young person looking to the future is to find an under supplied market - and train to fill that gap. We are still building houses in exactly the same manner as the time when Julius Caesar was the big boss of the Roman empire - by putting one brick on top of another - and it seems that a brick house is still the dream of most new home owners.
It seems that what is now termed a "career " is subjected to fashion and class divide. A century ago the children of the wealthy went on to university - and then the "professions ". The children of the "working class " were absorbed in the various " trades "! This was a clear divide of both status and earnings, but times have changed and now many of those qualified in a trade earn much more than their professional counterparts.
This shortage of bricklayers is sounding a warning. We need to look carefully at the broad labour market and tune TAFE and similar training facilities to the opportunities offering. The original idea of apprenticeships was little more than slave labour. Young people worked for a pittance in return for learning the basics of their trade from a qualified boss. All this training was "on the job " until the advent of Technical Colleges introduced the need for a broader "technical "understanding. Now apprenticeships are a mix of on the job training and classroom learning - and include subjects such as accounting and management because most trades become self employed and need to learn how to run a professional business.
It simply reeks of incompetence that we have a vast pool of unemployed young people desperately seeking work - and at the same time there is a shortage of those learning the skills to plug an enormous hole in a vital building industry. That can be successfully accommodated by - matching demand with supply !
TAFE and other training venues need to look to their curriculum.
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