‘Young people today just don’t have a work ethic’

Debbie Travis on the skilled trades and the entitlement generation

Canadian decorating icon Debbie Travis launched a new television series this spring. She’s not teaching viewers how to lacquer a table or do a faux paint finish on their walls. Instead she’s trying to save a generation she says just doesn’t have a work ethic.

“It’s a harsh statement,” says Travis. “But at the same time I don’t mean all twentysomethings. There are great 20-year-olds, 26-year-olds, 27-year-olds who are working hard, who are doing several jobs and who are pulling their weight. But we do have a problem because we do have a generation of young people who are the entitled generation.”

For her new television show on Global, From the Ground Up, Travis put up $800,000 of her own money to buy a house and demolish it. Then she found 12 twentysomethings to help her build a new mansion, literally from the ground up. Over five weeks these proteges learned various trades including carpentry, painting and tiling.

“I can’t in five weeks make them a master carpenter, but I can find their passion,” she says. “Passion will guide us in the next few years. The ones who don’t have the passion will fall aside and they’ll do the menial jobs. The ones who have a passion, who choose a path and start from the ground up, will be running the country.”

The proteges started with menial and boring tasks, such as picking up nails off the driveway, but as the show progressed they got more exciting tasks.

“The young people today aren’t interested in the trades, and if they are, they aren’t sticking with it,” says Travis. “Work ethic is about seeing it through, getting through the boring days and making it through the monotony.”

Travis, a successful author, designer and television producer and personality, knows what it’s like to start at the bottom. She lived in London with 14 other people to make the rent and worked for two years without pay as a BBC intern to learn the television business.

“You’d go to the grocery store with 60 pence ($1.25 Can.) in your pocket and have to decide between buying milk or eggs,” she says.

When she moved to Canada, settling in Montreal, she couldn’t get a job in television because she didn’t speak French. So she returned to her first love: painting. She did faux finishes, a technique popular in Europe but still new in North America. Her technique was in such high demand that she started teaching it and eventually filmed an instructional video. From that, she started The Painted House, a decorating show that premiered on the W Network in 1995.

Travis has also seen the younger generation at work as interns in her production company. There are the eager beavers who work hard and after six years are producing, but then there are those who come in and ask if they’ll be done work by 5 p.m. The latter group doesn’t last long, says Travis.

This generation isn’t willing to pay its dues and start at the bottom, she says. They approach life with the attitude that they have the right to have a lot of money and that other people should make that happen for them, says Travis.

The situation is especially dire in the skilled trades, where there is already a shortage of craftsmen and many are nearing retirement. Referring to the stonemasons on From the Ground Up, who were all at least 60 years old, Travis wondered who was going to take their place when they retired.

One of them, who came to Canada at the age of 15 from Sicily where he learned his craft, told Travis he had always wanted his kids to go to university. Then a few years ago he realized that if his kids want to afford a nice home, they should go into the skilled trades because there’s such a demand for craftsmen that the average carpenter earns more than the average lawyer, says Travis.

“We have an industry that’s booming and yet we don’t have the young people to fill the jobs,” she says. “We’re going to kill these crafts. If we kill them, you’re going to pay gold dust for them. Who’s going to plaster our walls? Who’s going to do all this stuff? We’re going to be living in pre-fabricated houses.”

But to save the trades, people need to see it as an honourable profession, one that they can take pride in, she says. In her grandmother’s village, the plumber was the most respected and wealthiest man because if things didn’t work there, you were in serious trouble, she says.

But over the past 30 or 40 years people have begun to look down on blue-collar workers. A few years ago, when one of the mothers at her sons’ private school learned that she painted houses for a living, “she looked at me as if I stepped in something nasty,” says Travis.

Changing perceptions starts in the schools, she says. When she was in school, her teachers taught her to knit because they didn’t think she was smart enough to go to university. “I can make a very good sweater, but I was also made to feel extremely dumb,” she says.

Students shouldn’t be split into trades classes or academic classes, but instead be allowed to follow their passions, whatever they may be, says Travis.

“If a kid is bright and talented and likes working with his hands, he’s going to make a fortune,” she says

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