Andy Shaw started his apprenticeship at 14, ran a bricklaying business for 15 years and has since worked alongside more than 25 bricklaying businesses around the country. On the podcast he set out why the trade is built differently to every other one on site, and why that structure is now working against it.
Ask a plumber what happens when new housing starts dry up and they will tell you about maintenance, insurance work and breakdowns. Ask a painter and they will tell you about repaints. Ask a bricklayer and the answer runs out.
“No one ever rings up a bricklayer and says, I’m tired of my bricks, I want to pull them down and relay them,” Andy Shaw told Az on this week’s episode.
That line explains more about the state of the trade than any workforce forecast. Andy ran his own bricklaying business for 15 years, went back on the other side of the fence as a building supervisor and then construction manager for a company building 250 homes a year, and now runs Brickies Network, a residential bricklayers association. His conclusion after five years of looking at how these businesses actually operate is not that bricklayers are doing it wrong. It is that the trade is assembled in a way that makes doing it right extremely hard.
The trade has no second market to fall back on
Most trades carry one. Electricians have industrial and service work. Carpet layers have insurance jobs. Painters can spend a whole career without touching a new house.
“When you’re a bricklayer, 97% of your work is in new construction,” Andy said. A single operator might pick up fences or patch work. Any business laying volume has to work for builders and developers.
“So it means that we’re more susceptible to the highs and lows of construction than any other trade,” he said. “And we’re under more price pressure because there’s a supply and demand issue that goes with that. We have nowhere else to go with our skill set if there’s not enough work for all of us.”
That produces a workforce which empties out in downturns and does not refill. “When we go into a quiet patch and there’s not enough work for everyone, they all jump out and there’s only like a fifteen percent chance of ever coming back,” Andy said.
It also produces prices that have nothing to do with wage rates. Andy puts the gap between states doing identical work at 30 per cent, with Victorian bricklayers earning that much less per brick than Queensland bricklayers. Wages are federal. Safety compliance is national. The rate is neither.
A piece rate flattens skill, and there is no material margin underneath it
“Bricklaying is one of the only industries left in construction that everyone talks in a piece rate for installation,” Andy said. Nobody asks a plumber what they get to lay a metre of pipe.
“If you’re talking piece rates, it automatically makes everyone the same,” he said. “Which we’re not. There’s a lot of skill gaps.”
A blanket rate per brick also ignores what the job is. Three metres of clear run around a volume home and a metre of access on an inner city knockdown rebuild produce very different daily output for the same money.
Then comes the part specific to this trade. In most trades the contractor supplies and installs. In residential building, the majority of large builders buy the bricks directly from the manufacturer, which leaves the bricklayer supplying labour and very little else.
“Like 70 to 80 percent of your bill is going to be labour, easy,” Andy said. “Now, labour is also the variable … that’s where you lose money. We stuff up, we’re human, we mix the mortar wrong, we have to pull it down, we lose it on labour. But the materials are constant.”
Which leads to the sentence that reframes the whole pricing conversation. “If you’re not making some sort of profit margin on the constants on the materials, and you’re expected to only make money on your labour, you are squeezed even tighter.”
Andy has watched that pattern end before. “There’s many other industries that don’t exist in Australia anymore that worked on piece rates, like textiles, car part manufacturing,” he said. “In the end the piece rate got drove so low that it was unprofitable and the industries collapsed. And that’s why I say that we’re really fragile.”
“In the end the piece rate got drove so low that it was unprofitable and the industries collapsed. And that’s why I say that we’re really fragile.”
The manufacturer and the installer never meet commercially
Andy describes the structure as a triangle. Manufacturers make the product, builders buy it, bricklayers install it. Money flows manufacturer to builder to installer, so the manufacturer has no direct commercial relationship with the person putting the product in the wall.
“I would say in the nicest possible way, the manufacturers have dropped the ball of looking after the installers,” he said, “ensuring that they’ve got enough installers for their product into the future. Because the squeeze that comes from their client onto the installer is pushing their installer out. So the triangle doesn’t rejoin.”
He will not blame builders for applying the squeeze. “I wouldn’t want to be a residential builder at the moment in Australia,” he said. “I barely know a builder that survived through COVID that hasn’t injected back in 50 to 80% of what they made the 15 years beforehand to carry their business through to where it is now.”
Compliance added about 20 per cent to labour cost with nowhere to put it
Andy estimates 75 per cent of people working in the bricklaying sector are engaged on an ABN at an hourly rate, with no superannuation and no workers compensation cover. “ABNs get handed out like lollies by the tax department,” he said. If it rains they go home unpaid. If the job is not ready they go home unpaid.
Two changes have made that model untenable. Since 26 August 2024, section 15AA of the Fair Work Act has required the employee or contractor question to be settled on the real substance and practical reality of the working relationship rather than the wording of the contract. Since 1 July 2026, payday super has required superannuation to be paid at the same time as wages and to reach the fund within seven business days.
“Payday super hurts too, because if you’ve got to pay the super every week,” Andy said. “It just impedes cash flow.”
Restructuring is expensive here because workers compensation is priced on risk and bricklaying prices badly. The Victorian WorkCover industry rate for bricklaying services is 8.377 per cent of remuneration for 2025 to 2026, the highest of any construction services classification in that state and nearly double concreting. The New South Wales equivalent is 11.520 per cent. Both bases include superannuation.
Andy puts the combined effect at “their overheads on labour has gone up by 20%, just like that. Super, work cover. Boom. 20%.”
The difficulty is where that 20 per cent lands. Going down to the worker means a conversation about a number they can see. “I need to take your super and your work cover out of your $55 an hour. And then on top of that, I’m going to withhold your tax as well. And then suddenly … you’re asking them to take $38. And they’re going, you’re ripping me off.”
Going up to the builder is no easier. On a hypothetical $2 a brick at 20 per cent margin, Andy’s maths has a business trading insolvent the moment it becomes compliant. “But you can’t ask your builder for 20% more. They’re gonna go, I’m not giving you another 40 cents a brick, that’ll break me.”
That exposure is carried against a client base with the worst failure rate in the country. Construction accounted for 3,472 company insolvencies in 2025 to 2026, or 24.5 per cent of the national total of 14,152, which makes it the largest single source of company failure in Australia. Andy has been on the wrong end of it himself, winning an order at VCAT and funding a liquidation without recovering a cent, because he was not a secured creditor.
Principal bricklaying contractor
The business that holds the contract with the builder and engages a team to install. Andy distinguishes these from the much larger group of individual bricklayers working under an ABN for a principal contractor. Of the 17,000 to 19,000 bricklayers he estimates are working in Australia, he believes only four or five thousand are genuine principal contractors employing teams. They carry the trade’s commercial knowledge, its training capacity and its exposure.
The industry is fixing this from the wrong end
Andy’s central argument is that the effort is aimed at the wrong target.
“I believe we are trying to fix the problem from the wrong end,” he said. “Don’t worry about the apprenticeship. Don’t worry about getting more apprentices on. That does come. I’m not saying it doesn’t need to come.”
His priority is the principal contractors, because they are the ones who can employ and train. “They’re the ones we’re losing more than anyone else in the industry,” he said. “They’re the ones that have the profound knowledge. They’re the ones that are forty to fifty. But if they can’t do that in a model that’s profitable, sustainable and compliant and afford to train new staff for the future and new tradesmen for this industry, then let’s just close the industry down.”
Bricklaying in Australia, he says, is “right on a precipice” of becoming “a bespoke trade if we don’t watch it.”
Inside a business, his benchmark is a ratio. “If you’re running a bricklaying business today, my opinion, you should have one apprentice for every two to three bricklayers you have working for you. Minimum. Because you will not have a workforce in five years’ time.”
Very few are near it. The answer he gets when he asks about apprentices is that it is too hard, too slow, and you go through 20 to find one. His reply is to ask where those businesses think the bricklayers they hire are going to come from, since everyone is saying the same thing. It is the same retention problem visible in the national apprenticeship completion rates, with one local addition: Andy says bricklaying apprentices are routinely told at the end of their indentures to get an ABN if they want to keep working, and that the first winter after that they earn less than they did as a third or fourth year apprentice.
What a good builder looks like from the wall
Asked what makes a good builder, Andy went to scheduling and to margin.
“The number one thing a builder needs to be is really well organised and have experienced supervisors running their jobs,” he said. “And what I mean by that is everything scheduled so it’s seamless, and ready to go for the next trade. And then on top of that, building the relationships with all of their trades based on quality, professionalism, reliability, and everyone making a profit. It’s win, win, win all the way through.”
For a trade with no second market, no material margin and a workforce it cannot replace quickly, that last clause is not a nicety. It is the business model.
Andy’s book, The Business of Bricklaying, is due for release in the coming months.
THE GOOD BUILDER TAKE
The useful thing here is not the shortage. It is the mechanism. Bricklaying is the one residential trade with no fallback market, no material margin, a piece rate that flattens skill differences, and an employment model that a compliance cost of roughly 20 per cent has just landed on. Those four things compound, and none of them are visible in a quote. A builder who understands them can tell the difference between a bricklayer pricing for profit and one pricing to stay busy. The second is cheaper this year and gone in three.
Frequently asked questions
The most recent Australian Bureau of Statistics census data, published through Jobs and Skills Australia, records 16,700 people working as bricklayers as their main job. Industry estimates put the figure between 17,000 and 19,000. About 1 per cent are women.
Estimates differ sharply depending on who is counted. ABS census data gives a median age of 38, younger than the all occupations median of 40, with 42 per cent of bricklayers under 35. Industry estimates commonly put the average closer to 50, reflecting a cohort weighted toward working principals and business owners rather than everyone on the tools.
Convention rather than regulation. Bricklaying is one of the few construction trades still quoted on a piece rate for installation. Because most residential builders buy the bricks directly from the manufacturer, the bricklayer supplies mainly labour, so the rate per brick carries the entire margin with no material markup behind it.
Rates are set by state and by risk. The Victorian WorkCover industry rate for bricklaying services is 8.377 per cent of remuneration for 2025 to 2026. The New South Wales equivalent is 11.520 per cent. Both bases include superannuation, and individual employers are adjusted from the industry rate according to claims performance.
Yes, through contract terms and registration on the Personal Property Securities Register before work starts. The documentation has to be in place at the outset, which is where most subcontractors fall short. Once a builder enters external administration, an unsecured subcontractor has limited recovery prospects even holding a tribunal order.
Related articles
- Commencements Are Rising and the Construction Workforce Is Still Shrinking
- Why the Construction Insolvency Numbers Will Look Worse Next Year
- Trade Apprentice Starts Grew 2 Per Cent This Quarter, and Only Three Trades Drove It
Last updated 23 September 2026.
General information only. The information in this article is general in nature and does not take into account your particular circumstances. It is not legal, financial or professional advice.
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