Such a dilemma.
Animals or people. Animal rights, people rights. Dead lions, dead elephants, well just dead animals really.
What to write about?
Anyway, for once human rights win out, so I’m not joining the poor dead hunted game animals rantalogue for once. I’ll write about people.
People. The ones who also deserve a few rights. Maybe.
Partner has been working nights. In pubs. When they are shut because greedy landlords don’t want to close during the day and lose money, so he does the graveyard shift, starting around 11/11.30 and comes home some time after 6 am.
Firms won’t touch this sort of work. It incurs treble time. Partner is lucky to get ten pounds an hour. He struggles to get that during the day.
Meanwhile, I’m scouring the Internet for work in Gib and notice a couple of items. A cleaner. Charges ten pounds an hour. She holds the key for five apartments. My partner has a five year apprenticeship and trade qualifications. He can tell you more about chemical properties of paint and related things than I can with my chemistry O level.
People do not want to clean. Amazing. They will pay anything not to clean. They won’t pay for decorators though.
A Portuguese guy on the Internet wants a job so that he doesn’t go home as a failure. Gee whizz. Plenty of Gibbos want jobs too. Sadly, my heart is not breaking for you. The Gibraltarian market is over-saturated as it is.
Apparently someone else on the Gib Internet is really cheap. Only charges £25 an hour for handy person jobs. I wish. I can’t even get that for editing.
(NUJ recommended rate £27 an hour.)
Still, back to the pub job as was. Take down pictures, repaint, and rehang them.
Except when it came to rehanging, the pictures weren’t safe. The fixings weren’t secure. The screws were broken.
Basically, they could have fallen on staff or public. This was a big safety issue.
I suggested the boss might want to get his maintenance team to sort it. Done.
But next day, handyman was busy. Instead, we should do it as part of the job.
Just to explain, rehanging in the same position is not the same as repositioning and drilling four new holes per frame. So that was a no. Repositioning was an extra.
He refused to pay extras for the work.
I told Partner to take his tools off the job and walk.
Partner paid his employee for two nights work. Out of our pocket, obviously.
Speaking to people, some said, you should always pay your staff. Others said, if I wasn’t paid, they don’t get paid.
I must be getting extremely old and out of the game. As far as I am concerned if someone agrees to work for us they get paid. Our issues are not their’s. If they carry out the work, they get paid. Simple? Maybe not these days. And surely, safety is a priority?
But while the world continues to corrupt itself, we exist in our microcosm of morality.
roughseasinthemed
Clouds moving in 
Just a curious thought – if you can get ten pounds an hour for cleaning, then why doesn’t partner get a cleaning job instead? Or are the hours not enough to make up for the rise per hour?
The first line in this post read as though one must choose between animals or humans from a rights point of view. I know that isn’t what you meant, you meant what were you going to write about in this post. Just saying because on the reader it only showed me this line.
– sonmi.u.t.Cloud
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Indeed. Why don’t we all do cleaning? Thanks Maslow.
Actually, it was what I meant 🙂 subliminally.
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I’ve worked as a cleaner, along with several other jobs to make ends meet. I’m not suggesting that he should do that, I was curious as to why he hadn’t. You can learn a great deal from cleaning *smiles*.
As to animal and human rights, they are intertwined for me, life is life.
– s.u.t.C
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*smiles back* actually he does clean. Every week. I pay him to clean our block. He would still prefer to use his skill/trade though rather than god damned soul less boring fucking cleaning.
We learn who isn’t in the block when he puts up the mats. Perchance you can tell us what else we are missing?
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Fair enough.
– s.u.t.C
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We all do what we can to earn money. It’s not recommended that I attempt to earn money cleaning however. But I think it’s a shame that a craft trade doesn’t command the same money as unskilled labour. What is a good earner is unblocking drains/sewage. Around £200 a job. Where there’s muck there’s brass. *said in genuine Yorkshire accent*
We both enjoy working within our trades. In an ideal world – ha! – that’s how we’d earn money.
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Yes, that’s what my original question was on about. I feel the same – spending years training in an area that we love and then finding it is undervalued is crushing for sure – I’ve been there, and I am there still. it’s a shame people aren’t valued as much as they should be.
Thank you. *nods*
S.u.t.C
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Some really important points… saw Jo’s rant. Anyway… glad you hopped on the people wagon for a change. I’ve always been aghast at how people with little or no qualifications get lucky and end up making more than those who have devoted years to intense study, research, testing, and even placements to end up with less money and lots of debt… or more sadly to end up flipping burgers because there is no support out there.
I’ve been there, where your hubby is… worked security overnight (more pay) while in studying full-time in uni to make ends meet with a wife and two sons.
Yet I’ve seen folks get a two year diploma and end up making twice a fully qualified teacher makes.
I’ve had kids (get this) in high school, question why they should study, or care about their grades. “I make more in one day than you do in a week!” (or was it month?) …but that’s another story. 😉
I’ve seen sons/daughters of CEO’s (NHS… even though they claim it doesn’t happen) come on an apprenticeship straight out of high school and within a year or two, they’re managing their own department.
I’ve had menial jobs that paid more than I got from tutoring, teaching, lecturing, and yes, especially, writing/publishing. So none of this is news to me.
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Maybe not news, but it’s still happening. People continue to be abused and treated like detritus.
What griped me about this was the sheer lack of interest in the safety factor. Nasty nasty boss. Rot. In. Hell.
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I agree… nasty boss should indeed rot. You’d think in this day and age people would be on top of shit like that. Guess some bosses still live in the dark ages.
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Send them back to the Dark Ages …
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when I read
it brought to mind a peculiar group of people called Mcees. These people are making so much money and the only training they do is trying to make their friends happy. Maybe I should change jobs
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All is fair in love and war, or in this case, anything’s up for grabs in the employment stakes. If money is the sole object, clearly one should advertise as a cleaner working on the black to gain ten pounds an hour. However, if one wants an interesting rewarding job, we settle for less but hopefully remain intellectually fulfilled. Somewhat like Maslow’s triangle I suppose.
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I would be glad to make my friends happy… Would you like to be my friend? 😀
Or, we could both change our jobs. 😀
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By all means, we would be friends and you would make me happy.
Then we can change jobs
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Touche! 😀
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I thought about stuff like this when I had to take Property and Contracts (two different classes). There are a whole host of rants that are possible with what is wrong about what that employer is doing to Partner. Hardly anything is acceptable, because the employer is trying to get free stuff from Partner without having to pay for it. And modern legal systems (at least the common law ones) still are wrenched towards the employers.
In a perfect world, Partner could do the work and then force employer to pay him what he owes. And that’s fair because Partner is helping him avoid injuring patrons to the establishment. Not only that, the employer asked for the work to be done.
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That’s a good and fair response. Remembering of course that ‘the employer’ is a sole trader employing another trader. So, no reciprocal relationships of employment.
We don’t live in a perfect world. Ojala.
Partner’s employee ended up vomiting at the thought of rehanging unsafe frames 😦 and what could potentially happen.
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Most employers really suck as human beings and I would have done the same if I was in your or partner’s shoes. Clearly this business owner doesn’t care about his customers safety as much as he should. Fixing what was not part of the job should have been extra. He can be so glad I don’t live there. I would have given him a piece of my mind for sure!
But that is how most employers are and they suck. It’s the same here. 😦 It seems that money are corrupting people so much that they don’t remember who are the ones making the bucks for them.
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You know, apart from having plenty of dosh and being able to pay for the extras, what really pissed me off was the total disregard for staff and customer safety. I clearly spent too long in trade unions and too long working for the health and safety executive. But what, what, is more important than our bodies? For goodness sake, a heavy framed object falling on you could knock you senseless. Concussion, maybe broken limbs when you fall? Who would not want them to be safely hung? It was a two person job taking them down they were so heavy. And from a financial perspective, it would have affected his public liability insurance if he’d had to claim on it.
On the first night, Partner’s employee was physically sick when they started trying to put them back and discovered how badly they had been hung. (You don’t notice when you take them down.) He was really stressed by it all. And when Partner went to pay him yesterday and explained he’d walked, the employee said, ‘that’s ok, I would have done too’.
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Seems people like that are all over. They wait for something to happen and then they want to do something about it. They suck!
Funny how people like us care so much about others and doing the job ‘right’ – where others don’t care at all and they get the big bucks. If it was me or hubby, we would have stressed as well. We believe in doing things right.
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I think it’s funny how minions like us have values and morals. Probably why we have no money 😀
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Yeah, it’s so funny it’s actually sad and yep, most probably.
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And how can you change who you are? You can’t. It’s your very essence. One of the things that attracted me to Partner, apart from the fact he makes me laugh, was that he was a nice person. Arseholes will always ever be just that.
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Nope, can’t change that. Especially when you are loyal, hard-working, honest, eager and intelligent.
The same with my hubby. My heart breaks for him and partner and folks like them. I wish I was an assassin so I could just get rid of arseholes.
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Better to have integrity and money. But next best is integrity regardless. The view from high moral ground is better than it is in the gutter 🙂
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Yeah. Integrity doesn’t put food on the table. Sadly.
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The race to the bottom is in full swing in the translation business, too.
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In any business John 😦
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Seems to be. Corporatism killed Capitalism decades ago, and corporatism knows only one direction.
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And add globalisation into the pot …
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I’m always amazed at how stingy some people can be. Sure, the bar owners have bills of their own to pay, but in all fairness this was an unanticipated issue and, as such, the owner should have behaved differently. Sounds to me like it may have been an issue for a small claims court. I don’t know how your system would work but generally in Canada it would cost you $50 to file a claim but you would not need a lawyer; the two parties involved would appear directly before the judge. Of course it would depend on how much extra the job would have been pushed by the need to re-mount all of the pictures.
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The richest are often the stingiest. These owners own not just one bar, but a string of them. Interestingly, despite the fact we lost money on it, ie not getting paid for the work done, and paying the employee, everyone we have spoken to agreed with our decision to walk. The main reason being, that hanging unsafe pictures is a non-starter as responsibility for any accident would immediately fall on us, so to speak.
And actually it was only an extra £50, plus fixings. In fact he’d agreed to pay for fixings (that might have changed when we told him how much though), he just baulked at the extra labour cost. It was a tightly priced job in the first place and did not allow for significant extras, especially not safety-based ones. So no, not worth the effort or grief to claim. We live and learn. Everyone keeps asking us, ‘have you kept the emails?’ The answer is yes.
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No one would ever pay me to clean – I just don’t do a good job….but yard work, I’m expert and precise at that….and painting walls. (not trim so much).
Partner is honorable and has integrity. He was right about the paintings and walking.
Businesses seem to trample more and more on the “little people” and get away with it. Laughing even about the “fools” the mistreat. More and more people are getting snooty about good skilled labor whether it’s editing, or construction. “Anyone can do it”…not really. But they seem to not care if the job is done right – just done…like home/house flippers here. (You rarely find a correctly done flipped house – all covered up and stage dressing.
So little pride in honest work these days…but considering how skilled workpeople are treated, no wonder. So more knowledge/information/skills lost as that generation dies or gives up.
Animals. Grrr. Delta has a new policy not to transport “trophy” anymore. Other airlines are expected to follow suit. So not being able to show off the “kill” might slow things down a bit – husband says they will just find another way to ship. It’s a start.
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Maybe we should set up in gardening together in another life. I can clean, but it’s boring as hell. Now gardening, on the other hand … I was perched up a ladder weeding an elevated tiered garden, and Partner came to give me a hand. Took one look at the tiny weeds I was pulling out amidst mulch and cleared off back to clean out gutters or whatever.
We’ve yet to meet anyone who’s disagreed with our decision, but as we mix with other small business people in construction, it’s unlikely. Interestingly, Partner was talking to someone yesterday who’d started a papering job. He’d been asked to go in on the job but when he found out the paper cost 70 cents a roll from China, he just laughed. Our reaction? It would fall apart when pasted, like tissue paper. Our friend spent two days filling the walls because they were in bad nick. Next day, he pastes two drops of paper. They fell apart. He walked from the job. Not politely either.
In the days when I flew, I used to look up the airlines that transported primates for vivisection. Air France was always a major culprit I remember. Not up on it anymore, haven’t flown this century.
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boring…that’s the issue.
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