I think most of us would agree that learning a trade is a good way to improve your lot in life. It gives you important skills, gives you a career path and improves the range of opportunities that are open to you. - Steve Murphy, National Secretary at the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union.
We encourage young people to go into apprenticeships to start their careers, and our skills-based Award system rewards workers who improve or expand their skills with higher wages. Or at least it is meant to – more on that later.
We’ve long known that skills are a key part of unlocking improved productivity, which is as vital to the success of our key industries as it is for the profitability of an individual business. Our standard of living will only improve if we’re able to continually improve our productivity and we can’t do that without a skilled workforce.
So, if we all know how important skills are for individuals, businesses and our nation, why are we so bad at delivering them?
In my view, there is a lack of certainty amongst employers, workers, students and the community about what the Vocational Education and Training (VET) system is for. Are we aiming to develop a highly skilled, agile and mobile workforce based on recognition of portable and transferable skills? When it comes to higher education, the answer seems to be “yes”. However, when it comes to vocational training, the system seems to be designed to specifically to meet the narrow interests of individual employers rather than that of industry or the nation.
This disconnect between what we need and what the VET system is delivering has many causes. Too often governments have thrown their hands in the air and said it was all just too hard, and left it all to the bureaucrats. Too often changes have simply tinkered at the edges of a system that needs a complete overhaul. Worst of all, when it’s training providers telling industry what they are going to have, we are really in trouble. I don’t have the space here to cover all of them, so I’ll highlight some of the most urgent changes that I think the winner of the next federal election will need to address right away.
Invest in workers
It is clear that more needs to be done to invest in the skills that workers need in the 21st century. These skills are best taught at TAFE and perfected in the workplace. We need better funding for TAFE because they have shown time and again that they are the best provider to deliver quality outcomes that benefit workers, the industry and employers in the long run.
These things can’t be done on a shoestring budget, with casualised educators and without proper resources. We need a properly funded, professionally developed and supported workforce at TAFEs around the country who can deliver the skills that we need.
Time and again we’ve seen that private providers do not meet the same standards or deliver the same outcomes. We need to get back to what works, and invest in TAFE.
Pay more for skills
I recently saw a statistic that amazed me in a Productivity Commission report. The report highlighted that while 85% of the workers in the VET system are there because they want to improve their skills in the workplace, only 18% are employed at a higher level after they’re finished.
Australia’s has a world-leading Award system that for decades has linked skills with wages so that workers were encouraged to improve their flexibility and productivity with the promises of higher pay. As the Award has moved from the primary wage setting device for most workers to a safety net, the nexus between skills and wages has been forgotten.
We need to re-agitate the classification structures in Australian workplaces to ensure that workers can be trained and assessed in their workplace and be paid according to the skills that they’ve got. This not only encourages workers to seek out additional training, it also helps workers to get formal, national accreditation of the skills that they already possess.
As a union secretary I am always going to argue for higher wages for my members. I can already hear the employers out there complaining that they don’t want to pay for skills that they don’t use, but it is this sort of small thinking that has landed us in our current skills crisis. We need to think about skills at an industry level, which helps everyone in the long run as the pool of skilled and available workers gets larger and are able to move between jobs with greater flexibility.
Investment is the key
In our industry, you can’t talk about skills and productivity without talking about investment in capital. While our skilled workers can work miracles, they can only do it for so long as the machinery that they’re working with isn’t ageing and out of date. Labour productivity has improved much faster than multi-factor productivity in Australia for the last 30 years. Workers are doing their bit to produce more for each hour that they work – it is a lack of investment in capital and intermediate systems, and a failure fully realise the potential of that investment, that is holding Australia back.
The future of Australian manufacturing is bright. But to realise that future, we need government and employers to be willing to invest in skills, to pay skilled workers what they’re worth and to deliver modern capital equipment that we can work with.
We need each of these three elements in lockstep if we want to deliver a future that is Made in Australia.