Working Hours? Do you ?

[Marcus Brody]

In a way this problem of travel/accomodation is what must be one of the biggest hidden cost in bajrs pay scales. Its presumably the area that most of the competative tenders compete on....... Those tendering for a job furthest away must be screwing down travel cost and time to compeat if they are to pay thier workers all the same for the same job brief. This subject is always presented as worker exploitation rather than deliberate underfunding of field work which is the only way that a tender from a unit with a distant permanant place of work can under cut if all other things are equal.

I (almost) completely agree with Unit on this, I've heard some appalling rumors recently about people being dispatched to the other end of the country with no accommodation, subsistence money or money for petrol being provided. Once they'd paid out for these things, the staff must have been working for almost nothing. And again, this seems to relate to some of the larger companies.

The only slight quibble I have with Unit's statement is that he seems to suggest that this should be presented as underfunding of fieldwork, rather than exploitation of workers. I'd suggest that it's both - in order to win the tender, the company has to submit a bid that is so low that it doesn't allocate enough money to adequately deal with the fieldwork, but at the same time, the desire of the workers to keep their jobs is being exploited to force them to accept poor conditions of employment.