Re-skilling Australian printing and manufacturing – news commentary by Andy McCourt

An ALP government, he said, would pay each apprentice $800 a year, for up to four years, and waive upfront TAFE fees for 60,000 trades newcomers.

“We’ve got to make the trades attractive to young people,” said Beazley.

The national president of the AMWU, the union which includes the printing industry, Julius Roe, praised the initiative.

“It’s part of the high wage-high skills solution Australia needs. We need more skilled workers, more training and more re-skilling,” Roe said, “The Howard Government’s only solution, so far, has been to allow temporary migration of skilled workers, under exploitative conditions. It is a strategy that denies wages, skills and opportunities to the next generation of Australians.”

Roe continued; “We’ve got to make the trades attractive to young people. Trades matter because they are the basis of a sound economy. A strong manufacturing industry delivers higher wages, job security and balance of trade improvements that benefit everyone.” To back this up, the AMWU has commissioned the study ‘Australian manufacturing – a vision for the future.’

Industry groups said the proposal was “a start” and also backed the AMWU call for a wider debate on skills shortages.

The focus on trade skills comes at a time of increasing disenchantment amongst employers, with the quality of graduates coming out of the University system. In yesterday’s Times, UK, this was headline news as “Graduates unfit for work, say top firms.” Despite a record number of graduates entering the UK job market this year, many will lack the basic skills needed for employment. They have identified a series of shortcomings in potential recruits, including too much time spent on achieving the right grades, lack of presentation and communication skills, and poor spelling, grammar and mathematical ability.

The over-emphasis on academic, at the expense of vocational skills, appears to be mirrored here in Australia and has led to a skills shortage necessitating the importation of labour. Young people, who would otherwise have learned trades such as printing, are drifting towards low-skilled work – often part-time and seasonal – that pays low wages.

My Call
It’s all about money. University education in Australia has become a business. Students pay for their degrees via HECS or straight-out cash if an overseas student. TAFEs and apprenticeships do not return the same dividends in short-term money but the government has become blind to the long-term social and economic benefits of investing in skills training.

Moreover, the Howard government’s political agenda does not include the trades and what we know as ‘working people.’ They are mostly not his voters. Abandoning print manufacturing in Australia; indeed encouraging its destruction by policies such as shifting government printing contracts offshore, is something that demands a great deal of soul and conscience searching.

Of course we also need to support the university system – witness GAMAA’s pioneering graduate work with RMIT – and if we are to re-skill the nation we must ensure it is with the right skills. For printing this means focusing on digital processes, electronic communication, post-press, CIM and JDF.

A Prime Minster long ago said he wanted Australia to be the ‘clever country.’ The interpretation of ‘clever’ can not be left solely to academia. It is not clever to destroy our manufacturing base and deny our grandkids well-paid skillful employment. Switzerland is often cited as the cleverest of countries and yet it sustains a huge engineering (including print) manufacturing industry. It clawed back its lost watch industry from Japan with brilliant strategies such as Swatch.

If we give up on manufacturing, we give up on printing as Australia’s third largest manufacturing industry.

I for one think Kim Beazley’s announcement of encouraging apprenticeships and re-skilling Australia is the best statement to come out of Canberra this year.

Footnote: ‘Australian manufacturing – a vision for the future’ can be downloaded as a pdf from www.amwu.asn.au.