I'm always amazed at how rarely the "go to uni and get a good job" angle is brought up in relation to our failing foundational industries in the west. We've been incentivizing people to focus on "escaping" the working class, rather than trying to find ways to make those jobs more appealing.

I work in healthcare. Treating student practitioners badly is the norm in a ton of places in this field. 60 hour work weeks are normalized, and wanting a good work-life balance gets you ostracized.

The worst part is that I had to compete to get into this job that treats me badly. My program only takes the top 20 applicants out of hundreds per year. The schooling is brutal, with midterm or final exams 2-3 times a week. This is possible because you are blowing through courses consecutively rather than in a semesterized system. Once you get to practical placement, you are treated like the workplace bitch, and you're expected to do 2-3x the work of a paid worker for free. Actually, you're paying tuition to be there, so it's even worse.

Don't get me wrong, some of the brutality is necessary. The rapid pace of learning makes it hard to forget anything. It's a great way to pack knowledge into the brain. But I would never recommend my program to anyone. It was a horrible experience overall. My job is pretty great minus the ridiculous hours, so I'm glad I went. But if I could go back and tell my younger self to do something else, I would.

Great summary of the industry. My family ran a small time contracting business, nothing major and our budgets was in the thousands rather than the tens or hundreds of thousands.

I learned a little bit of every trade and over the years we got connected with bigger companies and we could see just how terrible it was to work for them. They workers there always bragged about the money they made .... but if you spent time with them, you quickly figured out that their high paying job was temporary and they would go into long periods of low pay or no pay at all.

A saying I learned from one of the old timers is ...

'They hire us from the neck down' ... they don't want thinking workers or anyone to talk back, just put your head down, don't disagree and do the work. If you don't, they'll make your life miserable .... if you complain some more, they'll you let go, taken off, no longer needed or just fired.

I decided never to join any of these companies. I just did small time work for myself, small projects and made money only for myself. Keeping a low profile for almost 30 years and now I own multiple small properties and I have no debt. I'm not wealthy but I own everything I have.

We are literally starring at the brink of the 2nd middle ages where the rich held all the lands and all the power and the rest are just serfs. And we are all powerless to do something about it.

"The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second-best time is today."

Just starting an electrical apprenticeship in a couple weeks. I’m very interested to see how this plays out. Seems to me like there’s a lot of complaints on both sides between “nobody wants to hire apprentices” and “nobody wants to work anymore”. From my experience in hospitality, I feel like there’s a feedback loop of people don’t want to invest in real training because they feel those staff are just going to move on and staff keep moving on because there’s no room for advancement within an employer so they have to jump somewhere else to get ahead. I imagine a similar thing happens lots of other industries.

Which kind of mandatory apprentice ratios are you thinking of? Many trades have a cap so you can’t hire more apprentices without first bringing in more journey persons to train them. If you mean the other way where a place would actually have to be bringing in apprentices, I don’t think that’s practical unless you can perpetually grow your business exponentially as those apprentices are being trained.

We can import TFWs though.

There really isn't. We build through the winter in Winnipeg and it's miserable. A union carpenter can make 100k with a bit of overtime though so some guys will keep signing up....but not enough of them.