Uh, after training they get raises, right?
It’s one of the side effects of bad corporate leadership and layoff cycles — you can continually lay off your workers but the concequence is they will expect it and act accordingly.
We need better management culture. The downsides of the breakdown in employer / employee trust is profound and the impacts will be much longer lasting and deeper than people realize.
And it should be. "Loyalty" is just a feel good word. I'm not loyal to my company, and I don't know anyone who's loyal to their company. If someone offers me a 30% increase tomorrow, I'll take it. No hard feelings. I have my own life to live.
I expect the same from my company. They have their own "life" to live, if you wish. If keeping me around does not work out for their bottom line, then they should let me go.
This scenario happened to my father-in-law. He spent the better part of a year training a guy for free (not sure if he paid the guy), expecting that he'd continue to work with him for the foreseeable future. Instead, the guy left immediately after he'd finish training and became a competitor in the same local market. It felt like the year of training had been utterly counterproductive for my father-in-law, economically speaking.
The longstanding expectation in the trades (at least in the US) is that training/apprenticeships ought to be free or even paid, even when it calls for a major time investment on the part of the instructor. Perhaps that practice needs an update.
The trades are already suffering from a lack of applicants because most people will choose an office job over something where you gotta work no matter what weather it's outside and it's physically demanding on top of that. Gatekeeping applications will make that only worse.
Perhaps, but an industry-wide increase in charges/rates and salaries could mitigate that.
The point is, if we need more of something from others, we can help that happen by being willing to pay for it.
Which scenario is more profitable?
I’ve another friend who is an electrician, with a few dozen people working for them. It’s not as dire as the story the builder told, but he does have similar sentiments about how hard it is to find new people.