Trade Labour its a Dirty Job and not many Left to do it
I cannot contribute information towards the trades and labour market in the U.S. but I can give you all a little insight into the state of play here in the UK. I could give an easy and simple solution to the problems faced by the trade and labour market in one swoop. A total reversal in pay structure. The men and women who actually risk their lives everyday to make a living in the construction industry at the top of the pile and the armies of pointless bureaucrats at the bottom, earning what they are really worth. As we all know it is generally the person in the office who is generally paid twice the amount the person on the ground receives, regardless of their position. Why is this so? Well it has always been an accepted situation that this is how it works. You where a tie, you are more important, rubbish, nobody, I repeat nobody is more important than the skilled people who have spent a lifetime learning their trades and who perform the work.
The fact is this, the armies of pointless office staff, bureaucratic nonsense, endless lines of assistants and the pointless people being paid to check the PAT test certificates on the refrigerator in the canteen, are sucking the lifeblood out of an already unsteady sector. Ask these questions, why would anyone want to join an industry where the hours are usually long and hard, where you will effectively arrive home too tired to move, where your life expectancy is greatly reduced due to the strains imposed on your body, where you know the guy riding your back all day is earning twice what you are for doing little more than sitting on his rear all day? Why would anyone want to enter into that? More to the fact, why would anyone with skills in the trade want to stay in that situation and not be rewarded sufficiently?
The reason for the reduction in the trades and labour market, especially here in the UK is down to one thing, Bad pay. People are simply not getting the money for the amount of work that is required, and they are not prepared to break their backs for inadequate pay, therefore they simply find something else to do. I realise this may sound like socialist talk but it really isn’t as being paid at “Market Rates” is just an excuse to pay low wages and who decides what the market rates are? The white-collar sector, that’s who. There was a time when a tradesman or woman could earn a very good living in the UK and this is what has been jumped on and has virtually been stolen from them. The amount of red tape that stifles every contractor on a construction site these days is mind-boggling; the amount of pointless bureaucracy placed upon contractors is also mind-boggling. Also the safety requirements, which must be met on pain of death, and always at the contractors expense, is also greatly excessive and bordering on stupidity.
In the UK a leach like industry has grown on the back of the contractors in the construction industry. It is a totally overgrown and bloated industry that has driven many companies and skilled workers out of the construction trade altogether. The amount of money an employer needs to spend just to allow access of its employees onto building sites is astronomical and an amount many small companies cannot afford because they are also being screwed on price for the projects they win, therefore they hardly ever make a profit, not because they are slow or incompetent but because they are simply being ripped off.
Every employee in the UK has to hold a safety passport which is obtained from attending a primary school type exam and paying as much as £400 for the pleasure. That just gets you onto the sites, then there are other safety passports you must obtain to do the job you have been doing your entire working life. The fact that somebody, shall we say a bricklayer, who has been plying their trade for thirty years suddenly needs to pass an exam on things he or she already knows second nature is demeaning and degrading. The fact that they are usually presented to workers by a condescending white collar idiot who probably earns over £40.000 a year and has never lifted a bricklayer trowel in their life.
The leach I am describing here is the Health and Safety Executive. It is this overpowered, bloated and quite frankly in some cases, idiotic industry that is slowly killing the industry it was originally designed to protect. The amount of businesses that this Executive, with its pretentious and sometimes ludicrous demands, has driven out of the construction trade doesn’t bear thinking about. Neither does it bear thinking about the amount of small one-man band traders it has deprived of a livelihood. Many skilled men and women have been forced to leave the trade because they can no longer afford the pointless and condescending safety legislation, which they must endure to be blessed with work
Public liability insurance has also crippled many companies who cannot meet the extortionate premiums to work on already insured building sites. This is also money that has to be paid before you even make a profit. If the governments are wondering why the tax intake is down and will soon be getting worse, then they should look at just how many construction workers are now claiming benefits because of an over zealous safety organisation and rip off regime they have presided over.
This so called Executive has overseen the birth and spread of a virus like mass of private companies that provide this pointless training. Fair enough, I totally agree apprentices, green horns or somebody new to the construction industry as a whole should have to pass a test to access a site, but why should workers with vast experience and knowledge have to retake a test every three years? Do these people think the workers do their job as a hobby? Or maybe they peruse the workers must forget everything they know at three-year intervals because they are the great unwashed. It is the Lord and peasant relationship of the modern age.
They try and disguise it by declaring it is to keep the workforce up to date with the safety legislation of the moment, this being one of the biggest lies ever forced upon the construction workers of the country. No, It is all about making money, as in the lord screwing the peasant out of every penny. This leach could not survive without this income and they know it so they lie. Do not get me wrong, I am well aware of the need for safety in this industry, but not at the expense of the skilled men and women it needs to function.
The amount of resentment felt by trades and labour forces in this country at least, are at a point where I am surprised we have a workforce left at all. That is why the payment structure in the industry needs to be reversed, and then the correct people will be reaping the rewards and therefore you will have a better industry. Just think of the last opening ceremony you saw, did you see the men and women who actually built the thing they are opening? I didn’t think so; no, all you see are the shiny suites and gleaming teeth of managers, quantity surveyors, estimators, health and safety zealots, indecisive and incompetent architects, and the mayor, oh and at the back, if they are lucky, maybe the person who had to run the site for ten months while taking crap from all of the above and maybe an engineer or two.
It is a “Look what we’ve built” mentality that really is at the root of what is wrong with the industry, the people who really have had nothing at all to do with the actual blood and sweat working claiming all the glory. There was a time when you could turn up on a construction site and there would be three men there already. A site manager, an engineer and a labourer, and that’s it, extra help would be hired in when required. Now it is the opposite. There are more office personnel doing pointless jobs than there are site personnel doing real jobs. And these pointless personnel are all housed in mini villages constructed of nicely heated cabins with free tea and coffee. This imagery and out and out gluttony is sucking the majority out of the budget for the project before a brick is laid. This needs to be stopped or at least greatly reduced. It is a waste and if it is not brought to heel in the near future these people will have nothing to do but stare out the window, as there will be nobody to build their projects, well nobody who knows what they are doing anyway.
Trade workers in the UK are also discriminated against in the job seekers market. As they are paid so little they are regarded and being too expensive to advertise jobs for, thus you have many people who are highly skilled in a particular trade, sitting at home doing nothing, while not even knowing there is a job perfect for them around the corner. It doesn’t help the construction industry as a whole when you consider the fact that corruption is rife in the UK job agencies market also. They advertise non-existent jobs just to acquire tradesperson information for their books and then sell this information to other agencies, they hold jobs for as long as possible while lying to their clients about personnel levels so they can then charge more in recruitment costs. All this is done while keeping hopeful job seekers waiting, jobless and going broke. They are intolerably slow in function, generally incompetent, not fit for purpose and should be outlawed from recruiting construction trades and labour full stop. If you are paid through these agencies the likely story is they will be earning more than you are, as the amount they charge the client far exceeds anything you will receive in your pay packet. As an example they will be charging the client £25 and hour, you will probably receive £10 an hour, if you are lucky.
If workers were properly rewarded for their efforts as much as the bureaucrats of the industry were rewarded for how little they do, then the lines of people lining up to learn a trade would stretch as far as the eye could see. Proper pay, proper incentives and not being treated like you are four would inspire people to learn a trade and be prepared to put their neck on the line every time they enter the construction site. Many people are still doing this for precious little reward, but this I can promise, will not last forever.
The movers and shakers in the industry need to stop relying on temporary measures and wake up to this fact. Eradicate the image conscious cancer that is killing many livelihoods and reduce the amount of white-collar waste in the construction trade. Only then will they see a return of skilled men and women to make them look good again. They also need to stop relying on foreign workers to fill the labour gap. If they reduced white-collar waste, there would be no need for reduction of site labour costs by hiring cheap and inferior immigrant labour. This is another reason for the mass dissention and desertion and usually results in an inferior finished product. They have already lost a generation of skilled workers because of this.
People cannot be taught to erect steelwork in a classroom; they cannot be shown how to clad the side of a building one hundred feet in the air at some college, even though some have tried with pathetic results. They need to be taught by people who have actually done the job, that’s how construction works with previous generations teaching the next and so on. The white-collar side of construction need to realise that not everything is learned at college like the education they have received. A trade is learned by actually doing the job over many years. This is the organic process they are killing off. If they do not heed this warning they will find themselves knee deep in the mud and concrete or hundreds of feet in the air doing the job themselves, not a pretty proposition for most of them I expect.
