Reply to: General Long term Erosion of Contract market

Blame Labour policies

blame it on 13 years of Labour. They have done their very best to make the british worker uncompetitive.

Minimum wages, maximum hours, Health & Safety, faux equality laws, litigious friendly employment laws, open door immigration...

The Health & Safety industry is a huge burden on companies. The cost drains income and hinders productivity.

We have all seen in the news, the service women smiling because they won hundreds of thousands of pounds in compo for a sprained finger. That compo money comes from somewhere and it means some will lose their jobs.

Open door immigration and a couple of 100,000s of foreign IT workers joining the market. Supply goes up and the price goes down. Simples!

I read somewhere that prawns caught off Scotland are shipped off to the far east for shelling because it is cheaper than using scottish workers.

And then there is IR35...could it possibly have been introduced to make contractors more expensive? Who could possibly gain from that? Unionised permies?? How could permies in a union object to a contractor? As the unions provide the bulk funding for the Labour party, is there a connection? Surely not.

I have met quite a few Labour voting contractors. Fools & hypocrites each and every one of them.

[achilles]

Regardless of boom and bust cycles the general trend of IT contractor rates seems to have been downward over the last decade. I have never got the rate that was offered in 2005 over boom and bust cycles even though I feel I am much more qualified since then.

I would even go further and say that rates peaked in year 2000 and gradually coming down since. Not only that, the bench time between contracts seem to widen.

But even so, you can still earn a good income if you are able to secure contracts at top-end market rates.

[escapeUK]

Durham. If it weren't for the Japanese branch of the university I think the only coloured people I'd see would be running takeaways, except that we have quite a collection of nationalities represented in my church (no idea why).

Sounds idyllic, I envy you.

[d000hg]

Where in the UK are you d000hg? nearest city?

Durham. If it weren't for the Japanese branch of the university I think the only coloured people I'd see would be running takeaways, except that we have quite a collection of nationalities represented in my church (no idea why).

So you live in a 'white' town but your complaining about posters who don't like living in multi-culti places?

You equate colour with culture?

[SueEllen]

So you live in a 'white' town but your complaining about posters who don't like living in multi-culti places?

Maybe you should try and live in a place like this Rochdale: One town's story of immigration - Telegraph

Then come back and tell us your opinion.

Just because someone currently lives in a place doesn't mean they haven't moved in the past couple of years.

There are plenty of people who move around the country.

[Flashman]

Indeed. It's very white up here, to the point you actually notice someone who's black, which then makes you feel weird for noticing. Quite a lot of Poles appeared, a corner shop started selling Polish papers, but visually of course they blend in.

I agree. I was simply pointing out that even if that argument were valid, the other poster didn't even have his facts straight.

So you live in a 'white' town but your complaining about posters who don't like living in multi-culti places?

Maybe you should try and live in a place like this Rochdale: One town's story of immigration - Telegraph

Then come back and tell us your opinion.

[CheeseSlice]

Indeed. It's very white up here, to the point you actually notice someone who's black, which then makes you feel weird for noticing. Quite a lot of Poles appeared, a corner shop started selling Polish papers, but visually of course they blend in.

I agree. I was simply pointing out that even if that argument were valid, the other poster didn't even have his facts straight.

Where in the UK are you d000hg? nearest city?

[steveweaver]

Basically the country has 'gone to the dogs'

[d000hg]

You must be up north somewhere, or Wales. Foreigners still have taste.

Indeed. It's very white up here, to the point you actually notice someone who's black, which then makes you feel weird for noticing. Quite a lot of Poles appeared, a corner shop started selling Polish papers, but visually of course they blend in.

Interesting idea that we should a lot jobs to foreigners based on how many of their grandparents were killed by other nation's granddads. The past is another country.

I agree. I was simply pointing out that even if that argument were valid, the other poster didn't even have his facts straight.

[mace]

Simply not true. On the contrary starting salaries for software programmers in India has probably gone DOWN over the last decade as it becomes less of a specialised, 'high-class' skill. In the 90s only the best graduates who could afford going to tailored courses paying lots of money got into IT; now technology institutes have mushroomed, graduating hundreds of thousands of young people from ever-lower social classes every year. The big software houses in India recognise this of course, they know these trends like the back of their hand: I hear that just-graduated kids joining these firms are being paid lower than ever before (even as rents in Indian cities have skyrocketed).

Indian salaries will take a few years to match UK ones, but it would probably start to lose it's competitiveness when they're half a UK workers. Currently glassdoor.com shows a goldman sachs analyst role in Bangalore at base salary of £19k, whilst you'd be talking £70-80k in London, so it's about 1/4. If Indian inflation is 10%, and the wages kept line with inflation then it would take about 7 years until GS would start pulling out, unless of course Indian workers start to reach the same levels of productivity as the equivalent UK worker, in which case it'll take longer.

[mace]

- China: 2%
- Czech: 2%
- Poland: 16%
- Romania: 4%
- USSR: 14%
- UK <1%

We lost 400k people. Russia lost 24million, 60X more. I think we owe them...

Interesting idea that we should a lot jobs to foreigners based on how many of their grandparents were killed by other nation's granddads. The past is another country.

[mace]

Jesus ******* christ

Get your head out of the ******* daily mail and try actually spending some time in the parts of the country which you don't inhabit.

Great Britain is the 15th Largest island in the world, only the south east is "crowded" the rest of it has great expanses of open green. Thankfully twats like you rarely leave whatever inner city pub you inhabit to pollute the rest of the country with your bile

As I understand it, food prices are rocketing up nowadays because China, in particular, has got richer and their population are demanding more meat in their diet and meat requires a much greater farmed acreage than vegetables (as the animals eat a lot). Although, there may be acres of green space over the planet, we're still overcrowded.

[mace]

You sound very BNP, can you define 'native'? I've worked a few places and the only non-English person I ever worked with was a French guy. I've never worked in a company alongside anyone who didn't have a British passport...

You must be up north somewhere, or Wales. Foreigners still have taste.

[d000hg]

It makes me laugh when people play the race/BNP card when somebody is concerned about the level of immigration and consequences in this country, a very small island. That's the reason this 'great' country isn't so great anymore.

It's not crowded, the country can support this population easily.

If I look around and see dark faces and/or foreign broken-English accents it's not racist to assume these people aren't the indigenous population is it?

No that is NOT racist. I'm not sure it's racist to say those people shouldn't be here, that's xenophobia. Racism would be saying those people are inherently worse because of race, not because of nationality.

So, whilst 'natives' are sat on the bench and this lot are in effect taking their jobs, I feel it only right to speak out.

Once they're officially citizens, then it becomes pretty bad to say they shouldn't be here... they're paying taxes and so on. Arguing politically against using migrant workers is one thing, complaining about those who are citizens but have brown skin is just idiotic.

What galls me the most is that good people gave their lives in world war I and II to safeguard Britain yet in recent times we are giving the place away drip-by-drip. It's a cancer for which there is no cure.

From wikipedia, these are deaths as % of 1939 population in WW2:

- China: 2%
- Czech: 2%
- Poland: 16%
- Romania: 4%
- USSR: 14%
- UK <1%

We lost 400k people. Russia lost 24million, 60X more. I think we owe them...

[doodab]

People working in the UK desperately need globalisation. The UK is too small to domestically sustain the standard of living that we are used to.

True enough. The days of a nation being able to rely solely on domestic agricultural and industrial production are long gone. But that doesn't mean that we should blindly accept everything that happens from this point on, because an awful lot of things are decided by human beings and we have the power; and arguably a duty, to question and influence their decisions.