The trades are not as risk-free as they seem

Out of high school, Tamara Pongracz planned to go to university, so she tried to earn her tuition through waitressing, working in a bakery, and taking care of kids. Typical female jobs, she said, and the pay was crap. At the time, 1990, minimum wage was still less than $4 an hour.

“My dad was a plumber-pipefitter, and he said, ”˜Why don’t you come out and work as a construction labourer?’ ” she recalled for the Georgia Straight in a phone interview. “So I did for the summer. It paid $18 an hour plus benefits. I wasn’t good at math, but even I could figure out that at the end of university, I wouldn’t be making $18 an hour.”

So Pongracz followed in her father’s footsteps. She apprenticed as a plumber—a certification that allowed her to own an apartment and a car, secure a pension, and travel independently at a time when most of her friends were graduating with debts and no jobs. She liked the work, too.

“It boosted my confidence to do something,” she said. “I was working with a welder, and I learned how to use a torch. I’ve never felt more powerful in my life! Plus, Flashdance [the 1983 movie about a welder by day, stripper by night] came out a few years before. It made trades look hot.”

If you buy the hype, trades in 2008 are hotter than ever. Close to the oil fields of Fort McMurray, the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology in Edmonton is near the centre of the boom. In November 2007, NAIT’s five-years-out survey of the class of 2002 showed that some trades grads beat the salaries of medical students who graduated at the same time from the University of Alberta. The average salary of NAIT geological-technology diploma holders five years out was $70,000 to $80,000; for diesel mechanics, salaries topped $100,000. Plus, the survey found, unemployment among trades grads was just 1.2 percent, less than half the rate in the general population.

But are trades as solid a career choice as they seem? As the January 21 death of a 22-year-old crane operator who was working on the Canada Line illustrates, physical work can be dangerous. In fact, in 2006, 10 forestry workers were killed on the job in this province, according to the WorkSafeBC annual report for that year. So were 10 oil, gas, and mining workers (four of whom were less than 30 years old). In general construction, 35 were killed at work. Thirty-two transportation and related service workers died that year on the job. In total, 133 certified and uncertified trades workers died in B.C. in 2006. Compare that to the relatively low number of fatalities in the hotel, food, leisure, and business sectors: nine people died. It’s a fraction of the risk of more physical jobs.

Youths won’t find those numbers in pro-trades propaganda flogged by industry and government. The Ottawa-based Construction Sector Council hosts a site called Careers in Construction. In a section called Common Myths, the council presents this statement: “ ”˜Working in construction is dangerous.’ The ”˜response’ is, ”˜It’s true that many people in construction work with heavy equipment, power tools, and electricity, sometimes on high buildings. But on-the-job safety is always the first priority, and every province and territory in Canada has strict safety standards for construction projects.’ ” No one will argue with that, but the reality is, as WorkSafeBC noted, 35 construction workers were killed in B.C. in 2006. Trades accidents kill or disable British Columbians every week.

Trades, in 2008, also don’t offer a break from schooling the way they used to. Back in 1959, for example, operating engineer Frank Slyman started working as a packer at the Fort St. John airport. His employer offered him on-the-job training. When his coworkers voted to join a union, he was de facto “certified” to his trade.

“The attitude at the time was, if you finished Grade 8, you gotta leave home and go to work,” he told the Straight in a phone interview. “There were all kinds of things you could be if you had the attitude and you weren’t too lazy.”

For Slyman, it was a system that worked. He said his introduction to trades was “the best thing that ever happened to me”, allowing him to raise four children and support his wife, and they’ve “never been hungry”.

For his son, however, it’s a different story. Before becoming a crane operator on the new seven-lane, cable-stayed Pitt River Bridge, he had to get 5,000 hours of training—unheard-of in Slyman’s day.

Academics are essential for trades now, and the requirements are increasing. At the British Columbia Institute of Technology, to be accepted into electrician training, applicants used to need physics, English, and Math 11. As of August 2007, it’s math and a Science 12, according to the school’s Web site. The program is 40 full-time weeks of class time over a four-year apprenticeship, and $1,105.80 per year in school fees. For plumbing, it’s English 12, plus math and Science 12. That program also requires a four-year apprenticeship as well as $664.48 in fees per year.

By the end of high school, many teens have already eliminated themselves from the trades world, in light of those requirements. For example, only 52 percent of Vancouver Technical secondary school’s 2007 graduating students took Math 12 that year. Of those, 20 percent failed their provincial exam, according to the Ministry of Education’s 2006-07 optional-exam results. Just 22 percent of Van Tech’s 2007 class took Physics 12.

Back when she was in high school, Pongracz remembered, there was the attitude that “trades were for dummies.” Now, she said, trades are academically demanding. But all students can do it, she believes. They just have to want it. Pongracz should know. In 1998, she traded her tool belt for an office at BCIT, where she is the chief instructor in the ACCESS department, in the trades-discovery program.

“For the last few years, parents have been reading the newspapers [and seeing what an opportunity trades are],” she said. “Yes, their kids can go to university with the grades they have, but now they’re thinking about trades as a first choice rather than a second.”

It’s great for women, Pongracz believes—especially single moms who need free time evenings and weekends and a good paycheque. So she’s disappointed that so little government effort is going into helping women upgrade academically so they can take advantage of the opportunities. And she’s frustrated that the federal government has expanded the temporary-foreign-worker program instead of making a bigger effort to offer academic upgrading to “52 percent of B.C.’s population”. (See story, page 31.)

“It makes good economic sense for the government to support women on income assistance going into the trades,” she said. “If you look at the number of women in trades, it’s virtually unchanged for the past 40 years.”

Part of the reason, Pongracz said, is some trades are isolating and nomadic, meaning you have to travel to work. And, she said, sexism and discrimination still exist on some work sites. It’s a big wake-up call for her younger students, she said, the first time it happens.

Indeed, the reality and the fantasy of trades are sometimes worlds apart, according to Darren Francis, a University College of the Fraser Valley advisor. He told the Straight some
students say that they want to be crime-scene investigators, based on what they’ve seen on the TV show CSI.

“You see the actors, and they’re all attractive, wearing white tank tops to the crime scenes,” he said over the phone. “The reality is, if you’re there, you’re dressed in a big, puffy white suit because you can’t contaminate the crime site. Also, most CSIs work in the lab. If you want to be on scene, you have to be an RCMP officer, pay your dues for five or seven years on a beat, make detective, get degree credentials, and then you can move up to be a forensic investigator.”

Francis is chairing a conference for the National Academic Advising Association’s Northwest region, to be held March 17 to 19 in Vancouver. The region covers Alaska to Montana, including B.C. and Alberta. A common misunderstanding among “millennial” students in all areas, he said, is that an education will lead directly to a job.

“Kids have seen the movie The Firm with Tom Cruise,” he said. “There’s this idea that if you graduate from the right program, all the businesses will be lining up to offer you a job. We really need to suspend how much pop culture influences career choices.”

In trades generally, the rate of training-related employment after graduation tends to be good. At NAIT, about 97 percent of trades grads found work in their field within months of graduation, according to the 2007 outcomes report. Compare that to the B.C. University Student Outcomes reports from the University Presidents’ Council of B.C. Two years after accountants graduated, for example, 73 percent of them worked in jobs that were “very related” to their degree. Among IT baccalaureates, it was 64 percent. Among philosophy grads, five percent said their training was “very related” to their job. But not all trades offer a guarantee of employment with good pay. The average annual salary for aestheticians is $15,459, according to Work Futures. And Blanche Macdonald Centre aesthetics grad Kristen Foote told the Straight few of her peers have made that their career. One works in an aesthetic laser centre, one works in a clothing store, and several have gone back to school, she said. Apart from one graduate who has her own chair at a salon in Maple Ridge, Foote is the only one making a living at it.

Foote is a prototypical young trades success story. The 23-year-old hated her Williams Lake high school. Her idea of hell is sitting in a classroom, listening to someone talk, and taking notes, she told the Straight in an interview at a Main Street coffee shop. Makeup was her passion. She parlayed it into an eight-month aesthetics certificate with additional certification in microdermal abrasion, took out a loan, and had opened Honeydew Day Spa in Kitsilano by the time she was barely 20. On January 27, she flew to Mexico for the first vacation she’s taken in five years. She and her two employees are usually booked solid.

“My friends from back home are excited for me, but they don’t really get it,” Foote said. “They couldn’t imagine doing it themselves, so they couldn’t imagine that I’d do it.”

Foote’s success is a reflection of her as much as a reflection of her choice of training. Like any training, as Foote’s story suggests, trades are what you make of them.

Pongracz is no longer “turning wrenches in the trenches”. Since taking her desk job at BCIT, she’s gained 45 pounds, she feels “lumpy and pasty”, and she misses the camaraderie of working with a crew. Sometimes in the middle of the night, she said, she wakes up anxious about her lectures. It’s mentally fatiguing.

“With trades,” she said, “you show up with tools, get the blueprints, do as much as you can. You flush it, it works. Then you don’t think about it anymore.”

Even when it’s cold and wet outside, she said, there’s a bliss in trades work that’s missing inside. When it’s balmy out, Pongracz knows where she’d rather be.

But, as she points out, for the 10 years she worked outside, she kept her eyesight, her hearing, and all her fingers. As the December WorkSafeBC incident report reveals, not all tradespeople are as lucky.

Between September 1 and December 20, 2007, in this province, 15 workers died on the job. Most worked in trades. An additional 93 workers were injured. Plus, five young workers were permanently disabled each week in 2002, according to WorkSafeBC’s provincial overview for that year.

Pongracz said she stayed safe because she knew her trade, knew her rights, and took her time. Accidents happen when tradespeople are in a hurry or undercertified, she said.

Even Slyman, who made his living in trades for 49 years without formal training, said that in 2008 the training is necessary. Machines are more complicated now, he said. They’re more dangerous, too. And in the field, if you don’t know what you’re doing, you run the risk of killing another person as well as yourself.

Slyman, Pongracz, and Foote all well know the risks that a career in trades includes. But they still think the opportunities outweigh the problems.