Smart Business

People let out a whistle when they hear about triple-digit hourly fees charged by lawyers, business consultants and sundry white-collar specialists. But observe them closely when the subject comes up. They don’t accuse the practitioners of ripping them off. They are more awestruck than disdainful. They don’t like paying through the nose for those services but accept it as the way the world operates.

It’s only when trade workers present their bills that blood boils and stinging jokes fly. Blue-collar bias is endemic to our society. We can see it in the different work rules and amenities. Hourly workers get docked for taking personal time off, while salaried staffers typically get cut some slack. Office clerks get free coffee, phone privileges and clean restrooms, while skilled craftsmen make do with vending machines, pay phones and port-o-potties.

It's a 5 o'clock world

Back in the early ’90s, the media were filled with teary stories about layoffs of corporate managers amid the restructuring of our economy. Journalists could identify with their pain while never giving a second thought to layoffs as a fact of life among construction and factory workers.

High-school counselors everywhere advise students they have a better future as a third-rate paper shuffler than as a craftsman. And check out the scholarship offerings. See how many are available for trade education vs. college.

Have I made my case yet? I could go on for pages detailing the short-shrifting of the blue-collar world, but I’m preaching to the choir. All of you know what it’s like to be treated as second-class citizens. More significant than personal affront is the damage blue-collar bias does to your trade and your industry. Two repercussions in particular stand out.

1. You have a devil of a time attracting talented young people to your trade.

2. You have a devil of a time getting paid full value for the difficult, dangerous and indispensable work you do.

This second problem causes the first in that it depresses the pay scales for skilled craft workers, who would be more willing to put up with blue-collar indignities if they were adequately compensated for it.

Devaluation of the trades has gotten progressively worse over recent decades. When I was growing up, a high-school education was a notable intellectual milestone, and fewer than a third of the workforce went to college. Now, more than half the workforce has at least some college, although there’s been so much dumbing down of admission standards and curricula that many college degrees today don’t signify any more intellectual acumen than a high-school diploma of yesteryear. Nonetheless, most parents would rather see junior get a sheepskin from a third-rate college than acquire a skilled trade from the best vocational school or apprenticeship program.

Tiller of the ground

What to do? The industry’s great task is to overcome this image problem and do what it takes to bring back pride and prosperity to your trade. Here are some suggestions.

1. Sell the glamour of construction.

Glamour! Am I nuts? Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Observe how many people spend their lunchtime at a construction site watching a building go up. Construction projects are complex feats of design, engineering, machinery, ingenuity and hard work, a fascinating blend of brawn and brains. Best part for participants is they get to see the fruit of their labor for decades to come, even as long as they live, in many cases. Construction people can take their children and grandchildren to see what they created.

What’s more, the need for these skills will never disappear. Work may ebb and flow with the economic cycles, but people will always be in need of shelter. Even when construction slows down, plenty of maintenance and repair work needs to be done. Any marketing person who can’t romance these elements ought to look for a different line of work.

2. Recruit college students and graduates.

More and more apprenticeship programs are discovering high schools to be a dead end. Even kids who have an aptitude for trade work tend to be driven away from it by peer pressure, parents and counselors.

Seek them out in junior colleges and universities after they’ve tasted the academic world and decided whether it’s to their liking. You’ll find many of them feeling miserable and looking for alternatives. Parents who would have felt like failures a couple of years ago if their child didn’t go to college may support an alternative to seeing their money frittered away in failing grades and fraternity hijinks.

Even many college graduates may find the trade a welcome option compared with the dead-end white-collar jobs that await those who were slacker students. Older, educated apprentices hold a lot of potential for your firm and the industry as a whole, and well-educated craft workers are a perfect antidote to blue-collar bias.

3. Stir the entrepreneurial juices.

One of the best and perhaps most underutilized recruitment pitches is the opportunity available in the trades to own one’s own business. Small companies dominate the residential and light-commercial marketplace, and entry barriers are tiny compared with many other businesses.

Before doing this, though, it would be good for the industry’s contractor licensing agencies to step up the requirements for business training. Most have none, and those that do have minimal standards. The last thing the industry needs is more master craftsmen forsaking what they do best and opening up shop lacking any clue to what it takes to service customers and make a profit.