Glory days

摘要

The construction industry is not famous for change, at least not in the public's perception. The truth, however, is very different from the public's perception. In reality there has been a veritable flood of changes in the past 50 years, most of them for the better; some, however, for the worse. The most obvious change is probably the lack of apprentices in the industry. Try as they will, and some of them barely try at all, there are too few employees to revive the tradition of apprenticeship that was commonplace in the 1950s. Learning a trade for low wages does not interest the youth of today; learning skills that are rarely used seems to them irrelevant. In the 1950s when you employed a joiner, you looked at his bag of tools - tools kept in pristine condition. Today, a joiner uses electricity or battery power to mechanise their tools.