Read For the Love of God and the Arab Rising Page 5

  Chapter four: Reasons for and against. This contract has kept me gainfully employed for twelve months now and I have the unenviable task of maintaining 230,000 sq ft of a private building leased out to businesses of one sort or another. It’s the work load that is getting on my nerves and the continual push to please the client. And when you do perform to an exceptional standard, as per last year when I was actually presented with a maintenance award, there’s no bonus, or any performance related pay review for that matter. They say it’s to do with the present economic climate and that everyone is cutting back. No one in the industry has received an upwardly mobile wage review for a couple of years. But to get nothing year after year starts to wear thin. It’s the fault of the new money men, who bought the company from the ‘old boy’. The company was an old school affair and owned by a single trader who had built the company up over his life time. And he would be happy enough to run contracts that maintained a 10% margin of profit. But every working lifetime comes to an end and he accepted an offer from a leading brand name that wanted to enter the ever increasing building maintenance market. The old boy was loyal to his employees though, insisting that ten million of the purchase price was ploughed into the pension fund. But as the company rebranded the front end of the business and the new culture swept through the management team; new managers arrived and many old school managers were literally pushed out. Here now, at the coal face: we experience the aggressive financial push of the new company as they strive for a 17% margin. How do they achieve this? By not giving staff a pay rise, reducing overtime to chargeable jobs only and most of all, squeezing contractors to sign preferred agreements that push the prices up to enable rebates to be paid at the end of the year.

  So I decided to get my own reward and started to push contractors to give me a few quid on the promise of being awarded the contract for say, the annual boiler maintenance as an example. I intended to take my own reward and that’s how I ended up in this mess, with East Ham Engineering. The other contractors were fine, one payment, no special treatment, just get on with the job. Not East Ham Engineering, oh no, they wanted it all; project work, tool purchases and consumables too, all through their books. It was a hundred thousand quid a year and they were squeezing me to take as little as possible, so their cut increased to its maximum possible level; which was not going down too well with me. Still, if I had half a brain I would not have been so greedy; the situation was rolling along quite nicely until I tried to squeeze a bit more out of each deal, and now I am in a hole, and digging the hole still deeper. The time was right for me to calm things down and build some new bridges that would be of help instead of breaking down every last one I ever had. So it’s for these reasons that I find myself accepting invitations to socialise with new boss and his cronies.