Sydney butcher receives 140 applications for $130,000 job — all from overseas, none qualified
Clayton Wright, 66, has warned that Australia is facing a desperate shortage of young tradespeople and a 'perfect storm for businesses' of rising wage and superannuation rates coupled with cost-of-living pressures.
The business lobby says Mr Wright's experience is far from unique, and that the critical shortage of workers — especially tradies — is no longer just a hiring issue but an 'economic threat'.
'It's not a matter of money,' said Mr Wright.
'We have [had a decades-long] drain on people that have not picked up the trade, this is what we're suffering now.'
Mr Wright, a fourth-generation butcher and owner of Alexandria's Clover Valley Meat Company and Wrights The Butchers, says he is desperate for staff and has enough work to double his headcount.
But despite spending $1100 per month to advertise the position on Seek, Mr Wright has had no luck finding anyone.
'We've had 140 applications and not one was from Australia,' he said.
'They were from Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Nigeria, South America.'
Aside from some with experience working in halal slaughter, Mr Wright said the applicants 'had virtually no qualifications at all' and 'most were battling to speak English'.
'They all want a sponsorship,' he said.
'This happened years ago in the chef industry, where chef was an easy entry into Australia so all these people came and did a chef's course. The problem is that you have no butchers, so if you bring people in from overseas you have no one to train them.'
Daniel Hunter, chief executive of Business NSW, said Mr Wright was 'not an isolated case', and that 'we are hearing from business owners across the state who are advertising the same job two, three, even five times and still coming up empty'.
Business NSW has called for a three-pronged approach to urgently address the skills shortage — training more young people, getting older people back into work, and bringing in skilled migrants.
'There's no silver bullet solution to this, you need to do everything,' Mr Hunter said.
'There's three things you can do — you grow your own talent through better vocational training and skills, you can utilise the people that are already here better, or you can increase skilled migration. If you do those three things then you can certainly have a positive impact for businesses.'
Business NSW wants to see the federal government double the Work Bonus program limit for the age pension to $600 per fortnight to allow senior and retired workers greater flexibility to contribute to the workforce.
Mr Hunter added there needed to be 'better alignment between migration settings and industry needs, investment in vocational training and smarter workforce planning'.
'Migration settings — especially international student caps — need to be calibrated to ensure businesses across the state have access to the labour they need,' he said.
'The federal government's move last year to cap international student numbers sent the wrong message.'
Business NSW's 2024 State of Skills report found 28 per cent of employers surveyed had to make had to make five or more recruitment attempts for a single role in the prior year, 77 per cent reported difficulty recruiting or being unable to find suitable staff, 80 per cent had increased pay or improved conditions in a bid to attract workers and 36 per cent had deferred the expansion of their business.
Another 27 per cent reported loss of business to competitors due to being unable to recruit the people they needed.
Mr Hunter stressed 'the fact is we are at full employment in Australia and we need people to do the jobs'.
'The missed opportunity here is business growth and the potential of businesses,' he said.
'At the moment they have a handbrake on them. There are restaurants out there that aren't trading seven days a week simply because they can't get staff. The skills shortage doesn't discriminate but it is particularly amplified in the trades and also the regions.'
The 2024 survey found that 80 per cent of regional employers were struggling to hire.
Many reported turning to stopgap measures, with 36 per cent relying on contractors or external service providers and 75 per cent reporting increased workloads on existing staff, including many business owners themselves 'getting back on the tools' just to stay open.
'Small and medium businesses are the backbone of our economy,' Mr Hunter said.
'We cannot afford to let them fail because of a solvable workforce issue. The butcher who spent over a thousand dollars on advertising isn't just wasting money — he's losing business. This is unsustainable. Even with competitive salaries and generous benefits, businesses are not seeing qualified applicants, especially in the trades and skilled services. It's not just a hiring issue anymore — it's an economic threat.'
Australia's tradie crisis
The number of apprenticeships commenced each year boomed from the 1980s until a peak in 2012, and has been steadily declining ever since.
As of December 31, there were 311,760 active apprentices and trainees nationally, with over two-thirds in trade occupations, according to the National Centre for Vocational Education Research (NCVER).
That was an 8.3 per cent decline compared with a year earlier.
'It's not just me, it's the whole trade [sector],' said Mr Wright.
He said it was a problem that started decades ago with the focus on funnelling school leavers into university education.
'Traditionally everyone leaving school at fourth form became plumbers, electricians,' he said.
'The smarter ones would go onto sixth form and become doctors. They changed they rules and kept kids until they came out of sixth form. The universities saw an opportunity and develops all these different degrees that aren't really worth the paper they're written on.'
Mr Wright said the insistence on keeping even the less academically gifted students in school longer also hurt when they did opt for apprenticeships.
'We had kids coming out of school when they were 17 or 18, they were a little bit reluctant to do what generally apprentices may do when they're a bit younger,' he said.
'They had a bit of entitlement, didn't want to do this, didn't want to do that. There was a generational gap as well. That sort of continued for years and years, trades started to diminish. We've come to a point where not only the meat industry, the building industry, electrical industry, we're all having problems.'
Mr Wright added that it may go 'missing in translation' for people looking just at the trade award rates for butchers or chefs.
'After a three-year apprenticeship a butcher's award is around $55,000 to $58,000, probably on the level that you'll get in McDonald's,' he said.
'But it's very rare to find anyone that would be on the award, and most would be on double or triple. Typically now you'll get a butcher who'll work five days but really put in some hours, 55 or 60 hours, a lot of them will take home $2000 a week.'
Wholesale butchers earn even more.
'When we were growing up the teacher used to say 'if you're not smart at school you can always be a butcher',' Mr Wright said.
'My dad was a butcher, we were very reluctant to tell anyone what we did. A butcher then was probably on the same level as a garbo. Being a young guy going out and finding a girlfriend, saying 'I'm a butcher', they'll run a mile. That has changed dramatically in the last 10 years with the amount of media focused on cooking and cooking shows, butchers are now the celebrities.'
Mr Wright said migration was only one part of the solution, and that long-term it was crucial to get young people interested in trades again.
'It all starts at the school,' he said.
'Trades have to be refocused, re-jazzed. [They need to hear the message that] in the majority of trades, at the top end you would earn a lot. There's so many opportunities in trades, I don't know why since Covid it's so hard to get anyone. I think we have a whole generation that are mentally scarred from being locked up during that Covid period.'
Mr Hunter agreed that 'we need to bring balance back between tertiary and vocational pathways'.
'Recognise that those vocational pathways are excellent careers,' he said.
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