To tell or not to tell?

[malvolio]

Fair enough. My apologies if it came across as childish.

No worries...

What about all the immigrants leaving, not to mention all the emigrants "taking" jobs in other countries? Have you seen the official figures? They would suggest that net migration has lowered, thus there is less competition in the job market.

The ratio of joiners to leavers is roughly 11 to 1, officially. God knows what the illegal count is, since HMG doesn't try to find out.

Don't get me wrong: I'm as ignorant of all this as the next person. All I'm saying is that I think it's easy to point the finger at immigrants in the middle of a recession.

Luckily I'm not ignorant, since I'm one of the guys trying to fight it. 50k is a conservative estimate, most of whom started coming here by breaking ICT visa rules once we'd got the Tier 2 one sorted out. Nobody's pointing fingers at anyone, we are simply concerned that UK workers are being displaced by non-EU workers, many of whom are acxtually unqualified for the work they're being given. The odd Antipodean (and I know some very odd ones) is neither here nor there, but it's probably a smart move to keep out of the debate.

[gauche]

Update

Well, it's been 18 months but thought I'd update this thread. I did find a couple of contract offers and handed in my resignation, but had a heart-to-heart with my manager to explain that I wasn't leaving because of the project, but because of the money. The client then liased with my employer to keep me on board (presumably they had to pay a packet). I then contracted with that client for 14 months before moving onto my current contract in finance.

[Churchill]

Well, it's been 18 months but thought I'd update this thread. I did find a couple of contract offers and handed in my resignation, but had a heart-to-heart with my manager to explain that I wasn't leaving because of the project, but because of the money. The client then liased with my employer to keep me on board (presumably they had to pay a packet). I then contracted with that client for 14 months before moving onto my current contract in finance.

Since your last posts we won the Ashes, again.

[d000hg]

Did you get a big payrise going direct?
Did you save up enough to live with no work for a few months when/if you need to?

[gauche]

Re The Ashes, I'm running out of comebacks

Re the money, my pay nearly trebled on my first contract. It went up another 30% on my current contract. I've saved enough to pay off my mortgage (even at today's crappy exchange rate - I haven't actually paid it off because I'm willing to wait several years for that to improve), and will be heading back to Oz after my current contract expires, which I'm sure will make some of you happy (and me too, to be honest)