The thing is that most of those wages are not great. Starting on$25 is terrible when the job is backbreaking work in a toxic environment. I'd rather work in an office and start on $22 or whatever min wage is these days.
this post was submitted on 18 Sep 2023
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Is the $25/h rate for new tradies before or after the apprenticeship? To earn $25/h to learn, instead of paying it to learn is a significant step up in early life.
And while some degree earners, maybe even the average degree earner, may earn more over their life than the average tradie... I'd be willing to bet this is not the case for the majority of people who are doing a degree "because everyone else is" or they "don't know what else to do", as compared to the ones who e.g. have wanted to be a doctor their whole life.
Plus we have to compare the people who spend tens of thousands and drop out without a degree.
25 is the starting wage. Maybe apprenticeship starts lower. You go to a jobsite in auckland and you can find people doing the trade for 20+ years making under $30 an hour. Ultimately I think the trades are a good job but due to the people and culture of them they are a bad place to work.
The stats show degrees far out earning those without.
Why I think trades are bad is because of the people in them. The older tradies seem to be genuinely horrible people. I've only done 3 years in construction but every single job was filled with experienced people taking advantage of those stupid enough to try get into it. I was new to the trade and getting $19 while being rented out to the comapmy we were subbing for as experienced and $65 an hour. The senior guy spent his whole day gambling while the team who was all being paid $19-23 did all the work. The senior was racist and aggressive and would constantly make decisions that would fuck over the work other tradies were doing in site. For example he would borrow people's equipment instead of provide his own. He would get the forklift to dump our materials in front of other people's materials so it was harder for then to do their work. He would climb on other people's pipes and cable racks and sometimes this would break then.
A few other jobs all had similar dynamics. My dad who's been in construction his whole life compley agreed and has 100s of stories worse than mine. He says the pay isn't worth destroying your body.
Its definitely possible to do trades and not destroy your body but that would require treating workers with respect and not forcing them to work through sickness and injury. I don't think most bosses are capable of that.
These employers don't seem to care about the safety and dignity of staff either. After high school, a friend worked as a builder and he had to install pink batts without any protective gear, so he was itching like a p-head for days. I tried installing pink batts in an attic once. My goggles fogged up and I couldn't see a damned thing.
The median income in NZ is about $66k a year ($1,273 * 52). This means half of full time employed people earn less than $31.83 an hour (assuming 40 hour weeks - the median is even worse if you assume more hours).
If you're not a qualified builder, even if you've been working on job sites for 20 years, $30 an hour isn't too bad.
But on all your points other than money, I have heard similar things. I'm not sure what we can do about the attitude problem, as a country, in order to make the trades more attractive to young people.
It is systemic here. Macho attitudes to health and safety. Hour upon hour of AM/TalkBack radio doesn't help.
Oh boy, nothing makes you angrier about the "others" than talkback radio.
Hard to know whether our wages are too low, or costs are too high, or both. But yeah, looking at how low some of these cap out after a few years' experience and our insane housing costs, you can see why trades may struggle to attract people.
I'd take a job site over an office any day myself, plus trades typically get a company vehicle etc.
Tradies also tend to wreck their bodies early, reducing their lifetime income, so i don't think comparing hourly wages is the really important part when deciding on career choices
This varies hugely between trades though, and the sedentary lifestyle of some office workers isn't great either.
Skilled and qualified tradies aren't typically thrashing their bodies the way a site labourer will.
When I read the title I thought they were talking about like moving the standards to use radians lmao
Then I read the article
I think the connection between university and getting a job has damaged both. Universities should be a place where you can study impractical things because knowledge is its own reward. We should have a more comprehensive and less stigmatised polytechnic system for practical degrees.
The builders I know were getting laid off a year ago. Has the environment changed?
There was a lot of concern about raising interest rates and the housing market collapsing. So a lot of builders stopped new home starts. Numbers are still a bit down. Most trades that aren't as focused on the new builds market are short on labor. There's still plenty of jobs in general in construction.
I think there's a short to medium term outlook where parts of the trades sector are very much boom and bust, and then a longer term one where we aren't training enough people to replace an aging workforce overall.
Yeah, that makes sense. It takes a few years to train in a trade, and many more to become experienced.
I know here in canada if you are a newest machinist on the crew be ready to get dumped in about a year, happened three times since covid and I can't fault my bosses for not trying to keep me around but I've just been using the lay offs to get the school side of the apprenticeship stuff done, might try a different trade once I'm done with school
Building has always been a bit boom and bust, whereas other trades have a strong service base to keep things ticking over.
Plumbing and electrical are some of the best, in that regard.