"We don’t need another young person spending four years and going $40,000 into debt to end up serving lattes. What we need are people who earn while they learn." – Michael Geoghegan, president, B.C. Construction Association
Our kitchen faucet is leaking.
I put in a new washer and a new O-ring and that seems to work fine as long as you don’t actually touch the tap while you’re running the water. If you do, a steam of water shoots up and over the bar into the dining area, which also happens to be where my roommates’ computer sits. There have been some close calls.
We’ve ordered some parts for it, but if that doesn’t do the job we’ll likely have to replace the whole thing. A few cents worth of worn rubber will end up costing us about a hundred bucks. Still, it’s cheaper than a new computer.
Over the years, I’ve fixed washers and dryers, toaster ovens, and toilets. I’ve hung shelves, assembled furniture, repaired cars, painted houses, wired lights, replaced sockets, patched drywall, installed window panes and insulation.
At no point did I ever know what I was doing. I learned on the job with a good deal of trial and error, and pools of my blood, sweat and tears. Ever spray foam insulation into your hair? Ever hit yourself in the forehead with the claw part of a hammer? It isn’t pretty.
I learned the game from the master, my father. My dad was a home improvement nut, one of those Tim-the-Tool-man-Taylor types who liked his tools to be big and motorized. We were the only family in urban Toronto to own a chainsaw, with a 30-inch bar no less.
My dad could almost fix almost anything, often risking his life in the process. His home improvement misadventures include super-gluing the leg of a broken china horse to his thumb, falling through the fibre-glass awning over our back porch, cutting his head open on a rusty nail in the garage, and scraping half the skin of his arm in an unfortunate stucco mishap.
My brother and I inherited his enthusiasm for do-it-yourself projects, but with far less skill. My dad fixed things because that’s what the man of the house did in those days. We do it to entertain ourselves, and to satisfy our curiosity.
We are painfully aware that we come from a generation that doesn’t know how to do anything meaningful. We don’t know how our cars work, or understand the plumbing in our homes. We don’t know the fine art of weather-stripping, or carpet tacking. We don’t know what the peen part of a ball-peen hammer is for. We can barely hammer nails in straight.
At the same time, an entire industry (e.g. RONA and Home Depot) is hell-bent on making us believe that we can do almost anything with the right tools and a little friendly advice from a stranger in an orange apron.
Ignorance and power tools are a recipe for disaster for a Jack Of No Trades like myself. More often than not we screw up whatever it is we’re attempting and have to call in the experts to fix our mistakes – experts that charge a day of our wages for an hour of their time.
Plumbers, carpenters, auto mechanics, electricians – these are the tradesmen and women who keep the world running smoothly, and, according to statistics, there are far too few of them in B.C. these days. Homebuilders around the province are desperate to find qualified people, but the colleges aren’t producing enough graduates to meet demands. That’s why the B.C. government recently announced more than $300 million to fund more training opportunities for the trades – a year after they scuttled a 50-year-old apprenticeship program.
There are a lot of reasons why the trades are understaffed these days. The first is that a lot of B.C.’s skilled workers abandoned the province in the ’80s and ’90s to find work in Alberta and Ontario.
The second reason is that the government has cut subsidies for colleges specializing in the trades, as well as grants for apprenticeship programs and loans for small business.
The third and most important reason is that the trades are still looked down upon, even if you really can make a good living at it. Where I grew up in Toronto, it was made clear from a young age that we were going to university, not college. The industrial arts classes in our schools were under-equipped, almost entirely optional, and poorly supported by schools and school boards.
My high school shop was in the basement of the school, in a dingy room with no windows, and our projects were severely limited by the equipment we had. There was no auto shop or electronics shop – just a few table saws, drill presses and lathes. After you made a salad bowl and put together a lawn mower engine, there wasn’t all that much to do. You could make a fibreglass canoe or kayak in OAC year (Grade 13), but you had to pay for the materials.
I only took shop in high school for one semester, and my friends made fun of me regularly for it. There was definitely a stigma to that corner of the school, that that was where the dumb kids went. The shop kids were, by reputation, burn-outs and bums, and were going nowhere in life. Teachers looked down on you if showed up in class with sawdust on your shirt, and our school guidance counsellors discouraged people from taking industrial arts because universities don’t recognize the credits.
At the same time, my high school bragged that more than 85 per cent of graduates went on to university.
What they never mentioned was that 84 per cent of those graduates went on to major in English, History, Psychology or Political Science. And after four years of drinking coffee, reading books and writing essays, these people found themselves in the real world with no real world skills. You didn’t have many choices – you could either go back to school for a couple more years to get another more practical degree or settle into an entry-level job in advertising.
While the university crowd struggled to make student loan payments, the shop kids were out buying cars and homes, starting their own businesses, and generally enjoying life.
They have job security because they have skills that are always in demand, and they can travel anywhere in the world to find work. I can’t say that of my profession.
I always wonder, when I’m happily tinkering away at a faucet or tightening the screws on my bike, if I could have made it in the trades.
Thanks to a close-minded school system, and a society that stills looks down on blue collars, I’ll never know the answer to that question.
Anybody know a good plumber?
