Repairing our skills base

Just occasionally, I like to pick up a newspaper that I wouldn’t ordinarily buy, just to get a different flavour of the news. No, I don’t mean the Daily Mail – this time, my eye was attracted on the newsstand to a sub-headline on a copy of the International Herald Tribune. It read ‘At 75, Italian keeps fading profession alive’, and it went on to tell the poignant story of Carmine Mainella. Mr Mainella lost a hand in an accident at 14 and ended up leaving his village for Rome, where he has plied an honourable trade as a knife sharpener, working around Rome’s restaurants and bars and using a specially-adapted small van with a mini-workshop in the back.

He has done this for 51 years, but now finds himself as one of the last of his generation in this trade with a diminishing customer base. Why? Well, many restaurants now use rental services that replace knives every few weeks, and much of the cutlery is low-quality, short-life product imported from the Far East. Of course, in the short term, this appears a cheaper option for the restaurateurs, and so they are inevitably drawn to it. (Quite what it says about the merit of rentals and leasing that is so often mooted as part of the ‘new business models’ needed for the circular economy, I am not sure…).

This article was taken from Issue 74

On the face of it, the story is a poignant tale of an elderly man from a rural area quietly reaching the end of his working life doing something that is seen as a fading craft, and one in which younger people show no interest at all. It is a trend in society that has developed in the last generation or two, as manual and craft jobs rapidly diminished and lost popularity to services, finance, and the digital era.

Maybe, though, the stories of fine folk like Carmine Mainella might just be the pivot for a change in attitude? The Italian social policy think-tank the Censis Foundation reports that the trend is changing, and that the view young people are taking of their future economic prospects is leading some to opt for education programmes that focus on learning trades again.

There’s no doubt that recent UK education policy, by which I mean the last 15 years or so, riles as many as it satisfies in terms of the huge expansion of the university system, largely at the expense of vocational training and apprenticeships. The production of a generation of graduates with degrees that do not seem to equip them for the world of work – and that I’m sad to say are becoming increasingly devalued in the employment market – is the product of a policy that hasn’t run its course.

Recent expansion of apprenticeships has been a welcome policy move, and I think it reflects the same trend identified by the Italians. However, maybe we can do more to strategically focus this policy on the developing circular economy. Good old fashioned repair has the potential to return to the mainstream of the economy, with high levels of technical skill – electrical, digital, and mechanical – all coming to the fore.

The knife sharpener’s day may well be done (I hope not), but the return of the honourable repair trades, suitably modernised, may well be coming.