monty Wrote:Not difficult to work out which units are behind this......... they are charging 250 a day plus VAT per digger....and paying less than 65 of that to the digger....... I can see this getting through easily..IfA don't give a shit about the real world of diggers.....and never have done xx(
Is this company an RO? Is their head in the IfA? If so, email the DF, and the DF can look at the case. Like we did just a week ago, and have done numerous times. Where we see sub-minima pay or bad adverts we do something about it. And individually we may pay the price for this, but we don't let that stop us doing what is right.
If you have evidence then let DF/IfA/BAJR know and we will all see what we can do about it. If you know about a situation as you describe and do nothing about it maybe you are as much to blame as the dodgy employer? Don't just whine, act. Use the mechanisms available to you and do something positive. Don't walk on by.
Edit: Reading back through the thread I see that Monty is probably referring to employees, wheras I was referring to 'freelance' Diggers hired by companies -which is what David was referring to a few posts back. So I misunderstood Monty's post as being about low freelance day rates (below minima in fact) which we can do something about fairly easily (and are doing -right now), rather than low wages (above minima) which we can't do anything about easily. Apologies for the misunderstanding.
But I think my main points still stand.
1 That if there is anyone paying below minima then you should complain, and there are mechanisms for this and you can remain anonymous.
2 That if you don't, then you are essentially colluding with those that are dragging down the profession.
Not aimed specifically at Monty, but on a general point I do agree with ecmgardner (below) that there sometimes seems to be a (wilful?) ignorance of basic business costs that is a barrier to mutual understanding and progress on these issues. I don't think this helps anyone and exacerbates a Them and Us mentality, a feeling that managers leach off of the work of Diggers, its more complex than that, however it feels.