It's a bit more complicated than that....
Where I work, if we're taken on to do a job we just plain don't have the in-house staff to do many jobs that we design and specifiy, so we maintain a pool of contractors who're electricians or plumbers or the like who we'd normally go to for jobs. They're in business for themselves and'll work for other people as much as they work for us, and bill us through an invoice. It's a flexibility that enables small companies like us to gain traction.
There're big construction companies who'll have a load of employees who'll usually be tackling bigger projects that justify all that overhead, while smaller companies will tend to pluck up the smaller developments, and will rely on contractors because we're just not doing the work to justify full employees, and the contractor's able to go out and look for other work on his own. One of the services we offer is that we design a system that meets the spec' we've been given by an architect, and then we handle the mechanical and electrical contractors putting it in to the house so the homeowner's only paying us rather than handling the project management all by himself.
You'll get homeowners who'll actively try and fuck their builders over. The problem with so many 'small business' contractors is that, even if they're each behind a 'corporate' persona rather than sole-trading, some of them can end up spending a fair bit of cash on a job upfront to get it put in, then all the homeowner has to do to make the bill go away is refuse to pay them, until suppliers or sub-contractors get snitty and call for a windup or a personal bankruptcy. It's beyond rare that it happens because if the business doesn' fall over they either call in debt collectors or go to court - but it does and it's utterly destructive because even if a business does have some hedging to protect itself, it still hurts and pisses off everybody up the chain who's made to wait for their money.
Problem is, the industry has been cut right to the bone and Irish people really don't seem to give a fuck about the quality of work done, they just go for the cheapest upon cheapest. They just act mistified when cheap shite breaks in 4 years, or it doesnt deliver near what they wanted. We're also finding that a lot of the 'good' people have actually left the country to go to places where there's demand.
Good companies however, tend to keep good contractors by not screwing them over and treating them like dirt. Problem is a lot of people just don't give a fuck either way..... we've found that maybe 80% of builders we talk to don't even know the regulations. But we've found that paying bad money gets poor work done, which costs more in the long run in hassle for malfunctioned equipment and repairs. Or even one 'thirty year' experience electrician who couldn't follow a wiring diagram and needed handholding for hours. But most homeowners and the like just don't think about the long run.... it's like we're nationally blind to the concept that something like 'tomorrow' might come along.
What good people we have a pool of, do charge a fair bit more for the work. But you're not wasting days telling them what to do or how to do it.... or going back to site and sorting out their fuckups afterwards. In our experience, paying good contractors good money often works out cheaper in the long run when you factor in the hassle down the line - especially since modern home heating systems are nearly industrial in their complexity to meet energy efficiency regulations. (In fact, we use industrial PLC's that require programming where almost everyone else uses whitebox uncomfigureable things supplied by a heating manufacturer - and we get much better performance and reliability because of it, and I got a job because that's my background)
There are however, companies out there who abuse the hell out of this. One of those is a competitor of ours where basically the entire salesforce is techncially 'self employed'. If anybody dared to challenge it, it'd be a clear cut case of them avoiding their responsibilities as an employer, but they've got friends in high places who like to point to that company as a 'success story' for 'their county' when reminding the local expectorate to 'Vote for Me' . Another nasty one is a notorious direct marketing company who operate under a dozen pseudonyms I mistakenly applied to when they listed a job as a technical position - when it was in fact a door-to-door sales position for which I'm ill-suited for at best - and they threatened to tell the welfare that I'd refused a 'job' if I didn't sign what was obviously a fucking shit deal that would literally cost me more money than I could possibly earn. The natural reponse from me was that they offered me wasn't the 'job' I applied for - it wasn't even a 'job'.
________________________________
--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?
Where I work, if we're taken on to do a job we just plain don't have the in-house staff to do many jobs that we design and specifiy, so we maintain a pool of contractors who're electricians or plumbers or the like who we'd normally go to for jobs. They're in business for themselves and'll work for other people as much as they work for us, and bill us through an invoice. It's a flexibility that enables small companies like us to gain traction.
There're big construction companies who'll have a load of employees who'll usually be tackling bigger projects that justify all that overhead, while smaller companies will tend to pluck up the smaller developments, and will rely on contractors because we're just not doing the work to justify full employees, and the contractor's able to go out and look for other work on his own. One of the services we offer is that we design a system that meets the spec' we've been given by an architect, and then we handle the mechanical and electrical contractors putting it in to the house so the homeowner's only paying us rather than handling the project management all by himself.
You'll get homeowners who'll actively try and fuck their builders over. The problem with so many 'small business' contractors is that, even if they're each behind a 'corporate' persona rather than sole-trading, some of them can end up spending a fair bit of cash on a job upfront to get it put in, then all the homeowner has to do to make the bill go away is refuse to pay them, until suppliers or sub-contractors get snitty and call for a windup or a personal bankruptcy. It's beyond rare that it happens because if the business doesn' fall over they either call in debt collectors or go to court - but it does and it's utterly destructive because even if a business does have some hedging to protect itself, it still hurts and pisses off everybody up the chain who's made to wait for their money.
Problem is, the industry has been cut right to the bone and Irish people really don't seem to give a fuck about the quality of work done, they just go for the cheapest upon cheapest. They just act mistified when cheap shite breaks in 4 years, or it doesnt deliver near what they wanted. We're also finding that a lot of the 'good' people have actually left the country to go to places where there's demand.
Good companies however, tend to keep good contractors by not screwing them over and treating them like dirt. Problem is a lot of people just don't give a fuck either way..... we've found that maybe 80% of builders we talk to don't even know the regulations. But we've found that paying bad money gets poor work done, which costs more in the long run in hassle for malfunctioned equipment and repairs. Or even one 'thirty year' experience electrician who couldn't follow a wiring diagram and needed handholding for hours. But most homeowners and the like just don't think about the long run.... it's like we're nationally blind to the concept that something like 'tomorrow' might come along.
What good people we have a pool of, do charge a fair bit more for the work. But you're not wasting days telling them what to do or how to do it.... or going back to site and sorting out their fuckups afterwards. In our experience, paying good contractors good money often works out cheaper in the long run when you factor in the hassle down the line - especially since modern home heating systems are nearly industrial in their complexity to meet energy efficiency regulations. (In fact, we use industrial PLC's that require programming where almost everyone else uses whitebox uncomfigureable things supplied by a heating manufacturer - and we get much better performance and reliability because of it, and I got a job because that's my background)
There are however, companies out there who abuse the hell out of this. One of those is a competitor of ours where basically the entire salesforce is techncially 'self employed'. If anybody dared to challenge it, it'd be a clear cut case of them avoiding their responsibilities as an employer, but they've got friends in high places who like to point to that company as a 'success story' for 'their county' when reminding the local expectorate to 'Vote for Me' . Another nasty one is a notorious direct marketing company who operate under a dozen pseudonyms I mistakenly applied to when they listed a job as a technical position - when it was in fact a door-to-door sales position for which I'm ill-suited for at best - and they threatened to tell the welfare that I'd refused a 'job' if I didn't sign what was obviously a fucking shit deal that would literally cost me more money than I could possibly earn. The natural reponse from me was that they offered me wasn't the 'job' I applied for - it wasn't even a 'job'.
________________________________
--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?