22nd September 2012, 05:16 PM
I know my management would rather pay us better, but if they do we'll just start getting even more under-cut on tenders than we are now and go bust. In the meantime underpaid jobs are better than no jobs? 
The main problem is the outfits who put in farcically low tenders (often so low that it is inconceivable that they can actually do adequately the work they're tendering for) - a few years back a local-government operation won a small job (3 or 4 people trial trenching a carpark for a few days) with a tender which wouldn't even have hired a JCB for a day, and was about 1/10 of the other 2 tenders....errr....mysteriously nothing archaeological was found, apparently....only good thing was that they backfilled so incompetently that the carpark surface collapsed and they were forced to return and re-do it their own expense }
Where there are 3 or 4 tenders for a job, curators should be able to query/object to any that are significantly lower than the rest? :face-thinks:
The main problem is the outfits who put in farcically low tenders (often so low that it is inconceivable that they can actually do adequately the work they're tendering for) - a few years back a local-government operation won a small job (3 or 4 people trial trenching a carpark for a few days) with a tender which wouldn't even have hired a JCB for a day, and was about 1/10 of the other 2 tenders....errr....mysteriously nothing archaeological was found, apparently....only good thing was that they backfilled so incompetently that the carpark surface collapsed and they were forced to return and re-do it their own expense }
Where there are 3 or 4 tenders for a job, curators should be able to query/object to any that are significantly lower than the rest? :face-thinks: