The Survival and Decline of the Apprenticeship System in the Australian and UK Construction Industries

By Phillip Toner

The preservation of the apprenticeship system in the Australian construction industry contrasts with its collapse in Britain over the last three decades.

Given that the Australian construction industry has undergone the same structural changes that are conventionally advanced to account for the decline of apprentice training in the United Kingdom construction industry, this difference in outcome requires explanation. This paper suggests that the differences may be attributable to institutional differences in the organisation of labour, employers and the training system across the two countries.

It has been suggested elsewhere that, compared to its collapse in the United Kingdom, the survival of the apprenticeship system in Australia, reflects the self-interest of employers and a broad range of institutional supports that have been largely abolished in the United Kingdom The difficulty with this functionalist argument is in explaining why it was in the rational self-interest of employers in Australia to support the apprenticeship system but not so for their counterparts in the United Kingdom. The problems for product quality, productivity, innovation, skills shortages and rising labour costs arising from the collapse of the apprenticeship system in the United Kingdom have been noted for three decades. An alternative to this functionalist argument is that the UK construction firms supported a labour market strategy that brought about the collapse of the apprenticeship system, and that this may well reflect the power of ideology over self-interest.