To say that the apprenticeship system in Ireland is broken is quite the understatement. For anyone unfortunate enough to have slogged through the bureaucratic swamp that is SOLAS (who works with the educational training board in Ireland), like myself, will see it for what it truly is, a rigged system that serves no purpose other than the exploitation of young workers looking to learn a trade.
Their goal is not to educate or train the next generation of construction workers – anyone that has gone through their Phases will tell you of the terrible working conditions in the colleges and the lack of any real training provided. No, their goal is to extract as much profit out of young workers as possible.
Conditions for apprentices in Ireland are indeed shocking. The pay is well below minimum wage – as low as €7.41 an hour! And that’s if you’re ever ‘lucky’ enough to get the full legal rate, with a shocking 25 percent of apprentices reporting getting paid below this so-called minimum! You are daily faced with awful working conditions, forced to do dangerous jobs without training under fear of a sacking. Drilling into concrete filled with cancerous silica dust, climbing scaffolding without a harness, or working alone on live electricity without the guidance of a qualified electrician. To add insult to injury, because of backlogs and delays it now takes on average 6 years to complete an apprenticeship – 2 years more than what the “normal” length should be.
And for what? As another apprentice put it while talking to the Irish Examiner, “a lot of people are turned off by the wages. We’ve a cost-of-living crisis, it’s very hard to come out with anything on €1,300 a month with all of your bills… I know lads with a kid or two, what do you do in that position?” Is it any wonder that more than 1,000 (or 20 percent of) apprentices drop out of their course every year?
And while apprentices are jumping through hoops to scrape together any existence with such miserable pay, the construction bosses are laughing all the way to the bank! As a matter of fact, according to CIS Ireland, the construction industry hit gold last year making nearly €14 billion in profit. It would take an apprentice more than 200,000 years of non-stop working to earn that kind of money – in fact, they’d need to just simply be older than modern humans!
There are now roughly 27,000 apprentices on file, with Simon Harris stating that “increasing the number of apprentices…is crucial if we want to meet the targets this government has set under housing” (which we now know they missed by a whopping 10,000). While paying lip service to all the new labourers entering into the system, it is precisely Harris and the Fianna Fáil-Fine Gael coalition that are responsible for allowing some of the worst working conditions in Ireland. They are now even looking to introduce a new “employer-led consortium model”, which would essentially further deregulate apprenticeships, lowering the already abysmal working conditions even more!
All the while the leadership of Connect Trade Union have done little of any substance to defend the interests of apprentices, in effect taking the sides of the bosses so often they are referred to lovingly as “the Bosses Union” by more than a few of its members. Losing out on things like travel time and ‘winning’ the smallest concessions like a pay rise that’s leagues below inflation – the leadership is more concerned about keeping good relationships with the employers than fighting for any meaningful change. They have so little presence on sites that I am often told, “I didn’t know we had a union.”
Enough with apprentices being used as raw material for exploitation by the construction tycoons. We say no to employer dependent apprenticeships – all training must be done under the democratic control of the workers in the industry! Apprenticeship programmes must guarantee a decent wage and permanent employment upon completion. We need a complete and radical restructuring of the construction industry, where training is provided as a right, not a privilege.
In order to do this, big construction companies should be nationalised and placed under workers’ control. This would allow us not only to provide good training and working conditions for apprentices and workers, but to also tackle the housing and infrastructure crisis which is plaguing Ireland.
Ultimately, there is only one way to put an end to all the pain and suffering we workers face every day: the overthrow of the capitalist system. But this will not just simply fall from the sky, we must organise under the banner of communism, fight back against the system and, in its place, establish a true workers’ democracy.
