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Rock Solid Masonry Training

EDITOR’S NOTE: The following article by Marco Procaccini from the Fall 2006 issue of TRADEtalk, published by the British Columbia and Yukon Territory Building and Construction Trades Council, is reprinted below with their permission. The cooperation that characterizes the training programs depicted in the story serves the interest of all members in the province.

Joshua Berson PhotoGraphics

Tilesetting instructor Guy Zecchini, left, works with Joel Akwel in the new Trowel Trades Training Centre.

Joshua Berson PhotoGraphics

Sara Clements was one of the first students to enroll for a course at the Trowel Trades Training Centre in Surrey.

Opening a school and setting up a new trades training program for B.C.’s brick, cement, stone and tile workers will create a future that is, in the appropriate words of their trades, rock solid.

In response to chronic skill shortages, declining standards and Liberal Government’s [of British Columbia] revision of the apprenticeship system, the Bricklayers and Allied Craftworkers Local 2 [BC] and the Cement Masons Local 919 have launched a self-administered training program designed to “pull all the masonry trades together, respond to the current and future needs of our industry and get more people into the trades,” said Local 2 President Rob Tuzzi. 

The new program is also sponsored, in part, by the unions’ signatory contractors via the Trowel Trades Training Association – a joint union-company organization set up to address the skill shortages in the industry and promote the trades to a new generation of potential workers.

“The life blood of any trade is apprenticeship and training,” Tuzzi said. “The new school gives us the opportunity to improve our skills, bring in new workers to the trades and improve industry standards by organizing more workers.”

He says that prior to the new program, set up last fall, most of the masonry training programs were separate from one another, with little communication between the programs, or between the two unions and the contractors. Training for specific crafts, such as plastering, stone cutting and tilesetting, was carried out in different locations under different conditions and at different times.

Tuzzi said the new program allows all crafts within the masonry trades to coordinate their training needs and requirements and address the market demands as they change.

The new school facilities are located slightly east of the south end of the Patullo Bridge, at 12309 Industrial Avenue, in Surrey. The building is, as expected, of modest and practical design but bustling with activity as over 500 students are enrolled in various courses throughout the day and evening.

The first group of students was cement masons, who voted recently to drop their participation in the training programs offered at Kwantlen College in favour of their own training programs.

The change has come from “market pressures in the industry,” said Ron Adamson, a Local 919 instructor. “Kwantlen only offered training programs during the day, but since things are so busy now, contractors
need people to be on the job. With our own school, we can offer training courses at night so people can still work during the day.”

The school has also won the support of the Discovery to Apprenticeship Program, a community effort to encourage youth to get into skills development and trades training, sponsored by the Lower Mainland locals of the United Food and Commercial Workers.

…[The] programs are geared toward full-scope apprenticeship training and national Red Seal approval. Like all building trades training programs... Local 2... rejected the provincial government’s notion of providing piecemeal task training...“We want to preserve the apprenticeship-to-journeyperson Red Seal for all of our crafts,” [said Tuzzi].