"Skills crisis is of employers' making"
By Adele Horin
Sydney Morning Herald October 16, 2004

"Can't get a plumber when you need one? Can't get a carpenter for love or money? Don't worry, the Prime Minister is on your case.

"The "skills shortage" is top of his fourth term agenda. "We have a desperate shortage in this country of skilled tradesmen," John Howard said after the election victory. A billion dollars here, 24 new technical high schools there, Howard burns with a new-found passion to reskill the nation and solve the crisis.

"But why does Australia have a skills crisis when employers have controlled the training agenda for the past 10 years? How come we have a crisis when the Federal Government has thrown at least $200 million a year, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, at employers to train young people? What did these subsidies achieve? Something has gone wrong.

"Before the Government goes further down the track of ceding the training agenda to the business lobby, it should ask some hard questions. Woolworths, Coles, McDonald's and business generally got a lot of taxpayers' money to train people. But did the nation need so many people doing three- or 12-month traineeships in retail and hospitality when it desperately needs nurses, and child-care workers, and the tradespeople to maintain our electricity, gas and water supplies, our road and train systems?
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"The "industry-led" training agenda that was supposed to usher in a new era of skills has failed to produce the results. We privatised the training market, and diverted government funds from TAFE into training firms and big corporations with training arms, and to subsidise any company with "trainees" on the payroll. Australia turns out about 300,000 "trainees" a year - about the population of Canberra - people who have done short, and cheap, courses mainly in bar work, retail, hospitality or basic business studies. Half the trainees, for which business gets a subsidy, were already employed by a company, according to research by Dr Phillip Toner, an expert in training, at the University of Western Sydney.

"Australia probably has the best-trained waitresses, bar workers and shop assistants, and the best-qualified unemployed in our history. But still we can't get a plumber to fix the tap, or a nurse to work in aged care, or a trained teacher to work in a child-care centre. For every four trainees, we produce one apprentice; it's cheaper for business.

"You can't blame the young people. Believe it or not, not all young people burn with a desire to study commerce or marketing at university, or to work in a mobile-phone shop. Given a decent option, an apprenticeship - especially one shorter than the current four years - proper pay and conditions, many might travel a different path.

"The main reason for the skills shortage is business's unwillingness to employ apprentices. It's not a supply problem but a demand problem. Australian industry relies on an existing stock of ageing tradesmen - in some trades the average age is in the 50s; industry is not prepared to make the long-term investment in a new generation of skilled tradespeople.

"The head of one of Australia's biggest TAFE colleges told me: "Employers are not taking apprentices on; if they want workers, they go to labour hire firms."

"In the bad old days, state utilities and departments like forestry or maritime services employed armies of apprentices. It was a public service. According to Toner, in the late '80s state electricity commissions accounted for one in five apprentices in the electrical trades. Now the public and privatised electricity companies employ about one in 50. Privatisation and corporatisation of government enterprises brought many benefits, but apprenticeship training was not one of them.

"Private companies failed to step into the breach. In the competitive, global economy they could not afford to take a public service attitude to the young. In the world of short-term returns, an investment in apprentices might not pay off for years. The CEO, with an average tenure of less than four years, would not be there to reap the benefits. Rather than invest in apprentices, companies outsourced traditional maintenance work as required, or poached competitors' trained workers.

"Employer reluctance in the new world economy is one reason for the skills shortage. Another is the nature of some of the jobs on offer. Not to be forgotten in the emphasis on "tradesmen" is the desperate shortage of essential child-care workers.

"You don't have to be Einstein or John Howard to realise poor pay is the main reason people shun work in child care. Child-care workers are leaving the industry to work for more money as cleaners. Most parents lack the discretionary income to pay the kind of wages that would solve the child-care worker shortage. So what is the Government going to do about that?

"As for the nurse shortage, there are 30,000 registered nurses in NSW who are not working as nurses, according to a study by ACIRRT, the research and training organisation at Sydney University; about 11,000 of them would be interested in returning to work. But they want to return to a less stressful system, not one that churns the patients through in back-breaking numbers, and demands absurd levels of "productivity" from staff.

"Better working conditions and a commitment from employers to co-operate and share the "risk" of training are possible ways forward. Certainly, before Howard throws more money at the skills shortage, he should ensure it will be used wisely. Otherwise it amounts to more business welfare."

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"We trained hard, but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form up into teams, we would be reorganized. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganizing, and a wonderful method it can be for creating an illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency and demoralization."

- Gaius Petronius, A.D.66

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