Polytechs offer apprentices lifeline

Auckland's two polytechnics want to take on some of the 1600 building trades apprentices who have lost their jobs in the recession.

The Building and Construction Industry Training Organisation is backing the proposal by Unitec in Mt Albert and the Manukau Institute of Technology to pick up 500 to 600 of the redundant apprentices.

But the Industry Training Federation has asked Education Minister Anne Tolley to stop the polytechnics becoming apprenticeship co-ordinators because their education-based funding costs three times as much as funding through the industry training system.

"It's a very expensive model. They use the equivalent-fulltime-student funding system at $8800 per student, compared with the $3000 or so that the industry training organisations get," said federation director Jeremy Baker.

"We believe there's $15 million of this sort of stuff going on. We have asked the minister to sort it out and she said she's going to look at it," he said.

Organisation chief executive Ruma Karaitiana said 2800 of the country's 9500 building trades apprentices lost their jobs in the 14 months to the end of March as the number of permits for new dwellings plunged from 24,533 in the year to March 2008 to 16,234 in the latest March year.

Other builders picked up 1200 of the redundant apprentices, leaving 1600 out in the cold - the first net drop in apprenticeships since industry training organisations were set up in the early 1990s. About 700 are in the Auckland region, with more than half of those in Counties-Manukau.

"The demographic is an average age of 24 and on average they are two years through their apprenticeships," Mr Karaitiana said.

"At that stage of your life the most important thing in your life is household revenue, so they go where they can get money coming into the household. We suspect that when this turns around in the second two quarters of next year, these people will have largely settled into other things."

Manukau Institute of Technology academic director Peter Quigg said MIT and Unitec wanted to keep some of them in the industry by becoming their apprenticeship co-ordinators and placing them into short-term work with big home-builders and with Housing NZ, which employs contractors to upgrade state houses and build new housing.

"We would be happy for our staff to do the on-site assessment as well as providing the off-site training," he said.

"They [apprentices] wouldn't have a long-term employer. Someone would have to take responsibility while they are on-site - us here and Housing NZ for the building site because for health and safety reasons someone has to be the employer on the site."

In the last resort the two polytechnics would employ apprentices directly by boosting the work they already do with apprentices - building relocatable classrooms for the Education Ministry at MIT and relocatable homes at Unitec.

Mr Karaitiana said the scheme might be able to pick up 500 to 600 redundant apprentices for up to two years.

"This is probably a bridging programme," he said. "If you are taking people two years through an apprenticeship, they will take another 18 months to two years to complete.

"One of the big incentives is that everyone is predicting a recovery in the second two quarters of 2010 and it will become quite steep in 2011-12. If we can get people to complete their apprenticeship we'll have trained people available."