COURIER MAIL: BUILDING UP WORKERS IN CONSTRUCTION

 

Australia’s Tradies Look After Us. It’s Time We Looked After Them

By Dr Shivendra Kumar – Director and Principal Consultant, Shivendra & Co

IT’S hard not to have a soft spot for those who work in construction.

Drive past any major building site in Queensland and you’ll see them, the hardworking men and women in the sun and rain, day and night, striving to deliver the infrastructure we need.

More often than not, they’re working in circumstances less comfortable than those to which most of us have grown accustomed.

Boots on the ground, shovels in hand, they’re delivering a pipeline of more than $237 billion of the construction Australia needs for its immediate future, yet we’re allowing them to walk away from the industry in droves.

And the simple truth is that we can’t build the things we need and want without them.

The exodus from construction threatens to derail the delivery of Queensland’s key projects, yet the public would be surprised to learn how little we are doing to retain these essential workers.

Unemployment is at record low levels. It’s a competitive market.

Imagine a world where any other profession bounced from site to site over an entire career and left the industry in remarkable numbers as a result. It seems absurd, yet we tolerate a revolving door of workers in construction.

While the ping pong tables and couches that are now commonplace in the technology industry may not translate to building sites, construction could learn from tech. Here’s the lesson: satisfied workers stick around.

The five-day working week is so commonplace, few of us remember a life before weekends.

Yet this still remains the dream of most working in construction.

Construction often demands long hours and weekends, leading to burnout and a poor work-life balance and ultimately, workers leaking from the industry.

Our younger trainees say they also value workplace culture, so difficult to foster with a workforce unpredictably hopping from site to site.

Companies have a long way to go, but smaller operations can’t do it alone.

They require Government assistance to form part of the solution. Smaller operations that manage uncertainity and carry risk between unpredictable projects need to factor periods without work into their rates, particularly where they carry the burden of having to retain their more experienced and specialised workers.

Governments are able to provide stable work through their own infrastructure projects, but they also have a potential orchestration role to play.

The ask is clear, construction requires access to the Federal Government’s industry Growth Centre program.

It’s an initiative that could promote the collaboration and strategy required to ensure broad success for construction, but specifically to ensure it has the workforce it needs.

If cybersecurity, oil and gas have special growth centre support, why wouldn’t construction?

A thriving economy relies on a stable workforce.

However, there is also a debt of gratitude we must address.

Almost every one of us has offered a cup of tea to a hardworking tradie working in our homes. We acknowledge the difficult important work they do, we want to make it a little easier.

It’s the right instinct.

It’s time to direct that empathy toward the armies of workers building the infrastructure we need, often without weekends or stability.