Improved Pay and Conditions Can Solve the Housing Crisis
15 November 2024
The improvement of conditions in construction, including the right to retire at 55 or with an option to move to lighter roles such as and including training roles in construction apprentice training and construction skills in a state construction company of a newly formed industrial training authority. This is key, but only some of the parts needed to resolve the housing crisis.
We need to look at the workforce of the construction sector. It is shrinking due to a lack of promotion of apprenticeships in the education sector. If we stripped out the overseas workers in the construction sector, we would be in bad shape. Note that workers from abroad are not to blame here for reduced local workforce it’s how the construction sector operates. It is the problem and a nightmare for workers to deal with issues such as agencies, bogus employment, and a very high retirement threshold and these are only some of the issues impacting on the negative image of the construction sector.
Importantly, bad pay and conditions are a result of the private construction sector literally having no competition elsewhere for the skills they require. We need to expand the construction workforce.
It’s forecasted that economic outlook for Eastern Europe will fare better in the near future and this poses a problem of supply of skilled workers drying up when we need it as these construction workers will have access to employment closer to home.
The image of construction has improved but it is still not a good one, post primary schools do promote apprenticeships but not as much as they promote going to university, and some schools dont even present construction studies for the leaving cert. It is not for everyone. Also, not everyone can be an architect or an engineer, and if we don’t have a growth in trades, then we are in a crisis within a crisis.
The construction sector has a massively low representation of women in the sector as a lot of girls’ schools don’t run the construction studies course for the leaving cert. Some thought is needed to increase the numbers of women in construction trades.
Half the population, women, practically excluded from a sector that could and should resolve the housing crisis is a topic that requires more discussion.
One of the key directions needed is the establishment or the re-establishment of the state Industrial Training Authority, we can call it FAS Nua or whatever, but this must happen as a priority The present setup is too scattered and fails to provide the training numbers needed in the construction sector.
But immediately we need to retain the vast exsperience that we are hemorrhaging, applying new rules to retirement could be the key, there are plenty of roles senior trades could do, should wish or not wish to retire, the point here is to provide options for skilled workers who physically cant perform at the same level when they were younger, respect not contempt is some of the reasonings here, but it’s going to take a massive reform of the construction sector and any reform will need to improve how any potential new entrants view careers in construction and one change to act as a catalyst is that it must include the establishment of a state owned construction sector in direct competition with the private sector.
Roles for highly qualified trades people that would normally leave the sector for one reason or an other, could be absorbed with new roles in training, management and onsite inspection in a state controlled construction company and within a restructured Industrial Training Authority.
If hard working men and women can’t retire early at 55, if the need to, believe me even after 25 to 30 years of hard work you either need to leave or retire, then, the experienced workers will leave the sector all together and we will not attract new entrants at the level required if construction career offerings remain just in the private sector. This is the warning level we are at.
Contraction at both ends of the skill sets is going to be a problem if plans are not put in place and this problem is here now and needing resolving.
Yet nobody is discussing this.
This does not need to happen. The focus in construction has to move away from a sector that is profit driven and obsessed with money. Profit does not solve any crisis, whether it is healthcare or the housing crisis
One of the key reasons for our housing crisis is that it was created by Fianna Fail and Fianna Gael by willingly allowing the introduction foreign companies, local developers, REITs and investment vehicles to take over the funding of building housing and now they are also snapping up at alarming rates the existing housing stock to the exclusion of ordinary people young and old.
These establishment parties will never admit that they are responsible for the housing crisis because this admission will only expose how they actually benefited from starting this crisis in the first place.
We only have to see what board of directors Enda Kenny got appointed to after he stepped down from being the leader of Fianna Gael.
So until construction workers and the construction sector are divorced from the corruption of big money, we won’t see rent caps and the prices of house reducing. So in a sense we need to improve the pay and conditions first of the workforce in the construction sector in order to even start to resolve this crisis and that starts with construction workers being allowed or having the option to become public servants if they wish, this in turn will introduce competion on the private construction sector forcing them to improve their employment offer and raising standards across the sector.
This argument above tells us, that measures designed to take profit out of building homes and improving conditions for workers will go down like a lead baloon because those who caused the crisis are not the ones to solve it and they are not going to take a hit to their bottom line and they would fight tooth n nail to appose them.
They are in too deep and are too compromised to allow any radical or logical solutions demanded by our citizens. But we need solutions like these to resolve the one crisis that is impacting all of us.
So finally, we must listen to workers in the construction sector, they have interesting insights, I believe the solutions are there, onsite, not in the boardroom or senior management. That does not mean construction higharchy doesn’t have any good ideas, but they do, but it would be nice to hear something worthwhile and radical from construction management one in a while, but we don’t.
There’s a general election on, so don’t vote for these failed and corrupted parties but do vote and do challenge these establishment parties at the door with some of the points above when or if they come knocking.
As a young female (27) contributor stated on the RTE current affairs programme stated recently, “don’t be nieve to think that those who created the crisis are actually going to fix it” a fitting comment from a cohort of our population that is badly affected by the housing crisis.
RED NETWORK