Making good on an election promise, the provincial government has announced its intention to alter current legislation in favour of a one-to-one ratio of apprentices to journeypersons throughout the construction industry.
Though the new rules haven’t yet received a final stamp of approval, some local trades strongly disapprove and worry that the government isn’t listening to them.
If approved, the existing two-apprentices-per-journeyperson (two-to-one) ratio will become obsolete and many apprentices will be let go. Many more won’t get hired at all.
Jamie Moses, Minister of Economic Development, Investment, Trade and Natural Resources, cited worker safety and proper training as the reasons for the change.
“High-quality training with the highest possible safety standards is good for the industry, good for our province, and it means more Manitobans coming home safely at the end of a shift,” Moses said in a March press release.
That press release referred to the death of apprentice Michael Skanderberg in 1999, killed while working unsupervised.
“For someone training to be an electrician, proper supervision can be a matter of life and death,” said Dave McPhail of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers union 2085. “It is a breath of fresh air to have a government that has the courage to listen to workers. Moving back to one-to-one will help keep all electricians safe and we are grateful.”
Skanderberg’s death provoked questions around workplace safety at the time, and a one-to-one ratio was established in 2000.
Approximately 20 years later, under the PC government, this was changed to a two-to-one ratio, allowing every journeyperson to train two apprentices. This was in response to worker shortages in many of the construction trades.
Ron Hambley is president of the Winnipeg Construction Association (WCA), a non-profit organization representing about 800 nonunionized construction tradespeople across the province.
“We can see the pending retirements for thousands of construction workers,” Hambley says. “In the next ten years, we’re going to have to find 8,000 tradespeople for this industry, so the quicker we can grow, the better. Apprenticeship is the principal way that the industry grows. So if you turn the tap off a little bit, it’s not going to grow any quicker. If there’s problems with the system, I think we should fix the system, not turn the tap off.”
Hambley says that the one-to-one ratio practiced before 2021 wasn’t a sweeping law that applied to all construction trades as it’s being proposed now. And when the change to a two-to-one ratio seemed imminent, the provincial labour minister involved the WCA and tradespeople in those discussions.
There was flexibility and there was dialogue, two things that Hambley says are missing this time around.
“The industry settled on the two-to-one ratio because it provides a good combination of training and mentoring and growth,” says Hambley. “We’re interested in growing the workforce. And to do that, we need to train more than one person at a time.”
Bryan Trottier is owner of Trotco Electric, a mid-sized company in Niverville that employs approximately ten journeypersons and ten apprentices.
Trottier sits on the board of both the WCA and the Electrical Contractors Association of Manitoba (ECAM).
“When [the government] says they do industry consultation, I’m always offended if [we’re] not consulted,” Trottier says, citing the WCA as the most dynamic association in the local construction industry.
According to Hambley, the trades union represents a much smaller proportion of the province’s construction trade workers compared to the WCA, yet they have great influence when it comes to government lobbying.
“The [union’s] concern is likely about making sure that as many journeypersons as possible in Manitoba get employment,” Hambley says. “Part of the concern is that, if you load up with too many apprentices, there may be journeypersons that are not [getting work].”
This may be true, he adds, when it comes to the electrical trade, which at present has a glut of apprentices and journeypersons in the system.
Trottier says this is because electrical work is considered the “cleaner” of the construction trades. This means it holds appeal for many apprentices.
Other construction trades, though, continue to struggle with a shortage of available journeypersons and apprentices.
As for the safety aspect, cited by the NDP as the primary reason for the change, Hambley says that the WCA would be able to provide statistical evidence to show otherwise had the labour minister been interested in seeing it.
This is because the WCA also runs the Construction Safety Association of Manitoba. Based on years of gathered statistical evidence, there is no reason to believe that two apprentices per journeyperson represents an unsafe scenario, he says.
In fact, Hambley adds, the data collected supports the fact that worker safety in the industry has been markedly improving year after year.
Hambley and his team at WCA will continue to try and engage the labour minister in conversations, even if the new law is enacted.
All the WCA is asking for, he says, is some flexibility in the regulation so that certain segments of the construction industry, which have high safety ratings and a shortage of workers, can remain at the two-to-one ratio if they desire.
As it stands now, the new legislation has the potential to penalize some construction companies if they don’t comply.
“The challenge, of course, is if you’re a small business with the maximum amount of apprentices [allowable today], if the regulations change, you’re now not compliant,” says Hambley. “That would be a Workplace Safety and Health infraction. They could ticket you for that.”
Potential risks
In the current market, Trottier says that it’s imperative for construction companies like his to remain competitive and reasonably priced. For this reason, employing as many apprentices as possible makes good sense.
“The consumer market [won’t] accept an all-journeyperson crew because it raises the price,” Trottier says. “On a $1 million electrical contract, it’ll raise the price by $200,000.”
Trottier currently operates his crew on a one-to-one ratio but still appreciates the two-to-one legislation. When a journeyperson calls in sick or takes time off, the corresponding apprentice can be assigned to another journeyperson for a time, preventing forced unpaid leave.
He knows of other companies that have consistently operated on a two-to-one basis for the last few years.
“When I’ve talked to them, they said they’d have to lay off guys if this comes in because they have no place to put them,” Trottier says. “They can’t get enough journeymen to sustain all these apprentices [on a one-to-one].”
Another big frustration caused by these legislative changes is that, too often, they are put into effect on very short notice.
“We bid far out into the future,” says Trottier. “We’ll have contracts that we’re bidding on right now that are three or four years in coming. So if you’re bidding it at a two-to-one ratio and then you have to go one-to-one, that costs you about 25 percent on your labour.”
To add insult to injury, the construction trades recently underwent a regulated minimum wage increase that saw journeyperson wages climb by 14 percent over a period of 18 months.
“So if you already had contracts signed, you couldn’t go back and get the wage increase put on,” says Trottier. “A lot of [companies] took a pretty big hit on that.”
For Trottier, who typically captures about 30 percent of the contracts he bids on, the wage increase resulted in him obtaining only three contracts out of the 100 he bid on. Many of those contracts, he says, may have simply been put on hold due to affordability concerns.
“It’s hard enough to make a living in the construction game when people aren’t changing the rules on you,” Trottier says.
According to Trottier, Ontario is the only other province he’s aware of that has legislated a one-to-one ratio. British Columbia and Alberta currently have a three-to-one ratio in the construction trades. Manitoba is the only province with a Construction Industry Wage Act regulating minimum wages specific to the trades.
Brenda Sawatzky, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, The Niverville Citizen
