Let’s face it, 2009 won’t go down in history as one of the good years. In fact, it sucked. Some contractors had a good or ‘OK’ year, but others in certain sectors have been feeling the pinch. Typically, this has resulted in longer unpaid periods between increasingly hard to find contracts, not to mention lower rates, longer hours (for the ‘day-raters’) and less cash.
But spare a thought for the poor employee. For most lucky enough to stay in work, few enjoyed pay rises or bonuses (unless, of course, they were one of the one-in-six public sector employees whose pay is still increasing). No, for the majority of private sector employees, 2009 was a year of pay cuts, short hours, redundancies, no training and no overtime, despite increased workloads.
Then, in December, just to cheer employees up, the government warned that taxes would be rising. And for many, all of that jollity was topped by their employers throwing a lacklustre, budget Christmas party with cheap food and a pay bar; the lucky few were told there would be no Xmas party at all!
So it’s no wonder that, when the snow and ice hit earlier this month, employees across the UK chose their duvets and daytime television as preferable options to battling into work. The weather and travel conditions were apparently just too bad for hundreds of thousands of employees to be able to make it into work.
Strange to report, then, that countless contractors – including in some of the hardest-hit areas – not only made it to their clients’ workplaces every day, but also managed to put in a full day’s worth of effective work. And many are the stories of contractors trying to liaise with their clients when those clients were supposedly ‘working from home’, only to find that they couldn’t get through by phone, internet or email!
I’m not a total curmudgeon, and do recognise that many employees quite rightly took the advice of the authorities and did not travel in unsafe conditions because their journey was not essential or they could work from home. But many simply did not and, not to put too fine a point on it, skived for a week or more.
So, what’s the lesson for employers and clients? It’s simple, if the work needs to be done, done correctly and done on time, then use contractors. Because contractors who don’t turn up for work, don’t get paid. When I was a City of London IT contractor, the unwritten rule was that, unless you had two broken legs or worse, you made it into the office. One year I needed surgery on my leg. The limp to the bus stop took 40 minutes versus my normal 7-minute stroll, but I always made it into the client’s office and spent the day with my leg elevated tapping out the binary. I did what I was contracted to do and I was paid for it.
It is amazing how the prospect of losing a day’s pay focuses the mind on finding a creative solution to making it into the office, even if it involves finding a number for ‘Dial-A-Husky’. Clients that use contractors know the job will be done… literally come rain or come shine!