Well as usual, you give me plenty of food for thought. I have admitted openly that on the ceramic tiling side, my contracts are down by 70% on last year. These in the past were always my fast earning contracts, I used to be able to finance the stone and marble works of the back of the ceramic contracts. I dont believe this was due to people who had been made redundant and then had re-trained, but to the influx of eastern european tilers in London and the South East. It seems these days that every site I work on, where Ive nailed the stone and marble contract, but the ceramics have gone to another company. All the ceramic tilers are Eastern European or Portugese, I wont comment on the quality of the work (I think you know my feelings about this). Every day I am constantly rung by men looking for work, and these are good tilers, who basically cannot find work and I dont have anything to offer them. Then I am rung by men looking for work, with little or no exp to show, who believe they can take on any job I throw at them, I cant risk it, I never would.
On the stone and marble fixing side, there is a real shortage at the moment of good fixers. On Friday another stone fixing company rang me up asking if I could spare 4 men for a stone cladding contract as they couldnt get any good fixers. The answer was no I wish I could but Im on a overflow situation right now with to much work and not enough good fixers.
Merle pointed something else out, and that is the introduction of pods on large contracts, they are tiled off-site and then craned into the location. This makes good sense financially for a contractor, but the
standard of work is ......!
If you have any worries about an influx of pen-pushers coming into the industry, you may be right. However, I think they will all be in for a big reality shock when they are out 'on the tools', I think a lot of them will be beating a hasty retreat when they see that what we all do is at times a vile dirty bone aching job. You know and I know there are days when you get home, exhausted, filthy and too tired to even talk only to face it all again the next day.
Pebbs