Who Are the Trades?

If you’re from the south, you might think of a Mexican on a roof or in a garden. If you’re from the country, you might picture a redneck who drinks a little too much and smokes a little too much. If you’re in Toronto, it changes block by block and trade to trade — an Italian plumber in one neighbourhood, an Indian doing HVAC in the next. And if you’re stuck in traffic on the 401, staring at roadworks on the shoulder, maybe the word that comes up is lazy — the guy who’s supposed to be paving the road, sitting on his third lunch break today.

I’ve done it too. And I’ll be honest — some of them aren’t even wrong.

Everyone has met the Italian plumber. Everyone has seen the man roofing a house in the heat. The stereotypes exist because there’s something real to each of them that everyone has experienced once or twice. That’s what makes people so sure of them.

But every one of them is a fragment. A single sliver of a much bigger picture, mistaken for the whole thing.

Stack the slivers up — every image, from every place, from everyone who’s ever been sure they had it figured out — and something happens. The type disappears. What you’re left with isn’t a stereotype at all. It’s everybody.

I’ve spent a lot of time talking to people in the trades. Old and young. Men and women. Every trade you can name. One-person operations and crews of forty. People from every kind of life you can imagine, who all ended up in the same place — working with their hands, building something real. And I can tell you: there is no stereotype that survives ten minutes of actually meeting them. They come in every shape, size, and colour there is.

So at TradeSpace, we came up with a stereotype of our own.

It might not be 100% right all the time — no stereotype is. But it’s a hell of a lot closer than anything anyone else has come up with. And we’re going to push it out into the world as hard as we can, until it’s the one that flashes up instead.

So here’s ours. Our definition of everyone who works in the trades.

They’re people who show up. Who put one foot in front of the other and go to work, day after day. Partly because they have to — and partly because it’s simply who they are.

They care about the craft. They care that the job gets done right, because their name is on it, and because the work and the act of service are tied up in who they are. You can’t separate the two.

They’re people people — whether they were born that way or built it over the years.

One thing I learned a long time ago: you’re in the service business. Doesn’t matter what you do. If you’re not looking after your client, they’ll go get somebody else. So you go above and beyond a paycheck. Quite often. And it pays off.

They make a life out of being good to their clients and good to the people around them. They’re the ones you call when you need someone. The emergency plumber at eleven at night. The extra pair of hands when a crew is short and a house needs framing that day. They make a life out of being needed, and out of showing up when they are.

And whether they set out to or not, they’ve spent their lives making their communities stronger. By painting the house. Paving the road. Building the community centre. Giving a neighbour down the street a hand with a burst pipe. Through what they build, and through the bonds they build with the people they serve — they leave their community stronger than they found it. That’s not a side effect of the work. That’s the work.

That’s who the trades are.

They’re the people who build our communities. And they’re the people who tie them together.