Yahoo Finance Long hours, early mornings: Inside the life of a ‘lazy’ tradie
Exclusive: "People have this misunderstanding that you can just become a tradie and make money."
In another life, the 45-year-old was a banker working a 9-5 job, earning $90,000 but, after volunteering overseas, he came back to start his new hustle and took on a mature-age apprenticeship.
“The apprenticeship back in the day to get your licence was seven years and the money is not the best, it’s really hard to go through,” Taskun told Yahoo Finance.
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The life Taskun painted for him and his “extremely hard-working” team was a far cry from the lazy and entitled tradie billionaire property developer Tim Gurner blasted this week.
‘Arrogant and unproductive’: What did he say?
The Rich Lister said tradies were “paid a lot to do not too much” and that many Australian workers needed to be reminded they were lucky to be in a job, proposing a fix that would put another 275,000 people out of work.
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"People decided they didn't really want to work so much through COVID and that has had a massive issue on productivity," Gurner said at the Australian Financial Review Property Summit in Sydney.
"Tradies have definitely pulled back on productivity.”
There’s no denying many have an image of a cluster of hi-vis-clad blokes on smoko, sitting on milk crates and smashing a mid-morning pie when they hear the word ‘tradie’.
But Taskan said that didn’t represent a large section of tradespeople, many of whom were self-employed and needed to cover extra costs like insurance, tools and marketing.
“People have this misunderstanding that you can just become a tradie and make money, but it’s definitely not like that. You’ve got to put in the effort, put in the hardship,” he said.
Everyone in Taskan’s team is prepared to pull long hours doing labor intensive, technical work and pride themselves on being reliable, he said. They were considered essential workers in the pandemic and Taskan said they “didn’t stop” during COVID-19 lockdowns.
But that doesn’t mean the stereotype is completely off.
The Sydney tradie said Gurner described a section of the industry perfectly and blamed the “churn and burn” tactic - used by bigger companies - for creating the problem.
‘Pay peanuts - get monkeys’
Taskan said smaller businesses were being muscled out of large contracts by far bigger companies,some who used apprentices to do menial tasks like picking up and putting tools away.
“Smart plumbers aren’t doing construction work. They don’t pay enough,” he said.
“Pay peanuts and you get monkeys. The tradies getting paid peanuts, their productivity is absolutely crap. Apprentices are being paid $18 an hour and not even getting taught.”
You have to know about maths, chemistry and biology to be a plumber and Tuskan said skilled workers were looking for better paydays with maintenance or industrial jobs.
Tradespeople working a 9-5 with a big company could be earning $50 an hour. The $400 a day wage may seem handsome to some, but Tuskan said there were faster and easier ways to make money.
“If you unblock a sewer drain, two drains, you’d make $700 and that’s going to take you three hours. Why is someone going to slave for someone for eight hours?”
Generational divide
After 15 years in the industry, Tuskan is proud to impart life-long skills to his team, noting how hard it can be to find someone willing to train young up-and-comers properly.
But he’d been disheartened by the attitude of some who have approached him, many with a simple ‘yo - need an apprentice’ on social media.
“Some of them couldn’t even put a LEGO set together,” he said.
“One apprentice came in for a job interview with a four pack of V and said he was up gaming all night.”
This could be said of any industry and plays into Gurner’s argument that a section of workers should be dumped to weed out unproductivity.
“We need to see unemployment rise, unemployment has to jump 40-50 per cent. In my view, we need to see pain in the economy.”
The unemployment rate remained steady at 3.7 per cent in August.
A 50 per cent increase in that figure, as suggested by Gurner, would put another 275,000 Australians out of work.
The unemployment rate is a key component in bringing Australia's rising inflation back to a more manageable level.
The Reserve Bank of Australia has pushed interest rates up in a bid to control ballooning inflation, but projected a jobless rate of 4.4 per cent by late 2024 would suffice. That’s a considerably lower figure than Gurner’s 5.6 per cent.
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