Lads telling war stories about pulling in €1,000+ a week back in the good days

jam_mac_jam

The snobery here is amazing. The nerve of people making lots of money without going to college. It was hardly their fault, it was good timing. People were spending silly money on houses so the people building them were on silly money only fair really.

Spread

There are some correct facts in BrianD3's post .......... but quite a lot wrong and sound like the musings rant of a bitter man.

Red_Wake

Pottler wrote: »

I gotta laugh at the outrage over €1400 a week. During the Boom, that was a reasonably ok days wage for many -I was in construction long before the boom, and I'm still in Construction, and I'm still flat out. Good men were and are scarce, there were hundreds and hundreds of cannon fodder types who could work a bit but were basically skill-less. The real hardcore of subbies were on just phenomenal money.
I have one guy working for me now who used to pay his men €1950.00 take home a week without blinking as they made him double that at least. A fun weekend was buying a new car(sports), driving it for a week then changing. Times have changed.
I started paying men a flat rate in the 90's, kept that rate pretty much unchanged bar inflation through the boom - Irish guys would not take it so I hired Eastern Europeans. I now have Irish guys queueing up to take it. It is far from stingy money. €1400 was not, not by a mares hole, a big amount to take home in the boom. I personally know men who made five figures in a day regularily but if I stated the amounts I'd be called a liar, so I won't.:) Almost to a man, they are flat bust today. I can't lecture though, because I also pissed my fair share away, but I stayed going. I bought a lot of cars, a lot of machinery and we lived very well, still do really. It was fun while it lasted but I doubt too many would swap as there was an awful lot of very hard graft involved. Site work is not easy money, no matter how much you are on.

Get him lads, he's probably in NAMA:mad::mad:

Pottler

jam_mac_jam wrote: »

The snobery here is amazing. The nerve of people making lots of money without going to college. It was hardly their fault, it was good timing. People were spending silly money on houses so the people building them were on silly money only fair really.

I well remember sweeping the roads with a brush on a new estate in Finglas while on the other side of the entrance gate people queued up in their cars to buy the houses. We had worked 30 hours straight to get the showhouse finished and were pouring the foundations on 6-8 houses a day as well as digging and laying the sewers etc.
I doubt any one of the people in those cars would have swapped with me at 7am on a rainy, cold winters morning facing into a day lugging pipes, climbing into and out of deep trenches, shovelling 804 and dragging concrete chutes, pouring concrete, repairing machines as and when they broke then carrying on, finishing at 7pm and then do it all again tomorrow, and tomorrow and the next and the next. The attrition rate was huge - new lads would start on a Monday and be worn out and gone by Thurday - if they didn't get the gate on tuesday. Easy money it was not and every penny earned was just that - earned. I have been slogging for 20+ years now and feck anybody who says what was paid to us during the boom was unreasonable, personally, no amount was too much for the work that was put in. It was high for a good reason. It was also available to anybody prepared to work for it.

Pottler

Red_Wake wrote: »

Get him lads, he's probably in NAMA:mad::mad:

Actually, I quite like NAMA, they're a valued client.:P

Wompa1

kowloon wrote: »

Do your thing and keep plenty of money aside. You could invest it in property. All the smart people are investing in property.

I myself bought a Harley I can no longer lift, let alone drive, bought guns that don't fire and I invested in a vest... for a pigeon... A pigeon vest.

I've already got a crippling 1k euro a week Fabrege Egg addiction...

woodoo

Pottler what were these guys who were making €10,000 in a day doing?

Boombastic

Originally Posted by kowloon

I myself bought a Harley I can no longer lift, let alone drive, bought guns that don't fire and I invested in a vest... for a pigeon... A pigeon vest.

:pac:
http://29.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m31k8xAAfT1r00kqqo1_500.jpg

Pottler

woodoo wrote: »

Pottler what were these guys who were making €10,000 in a day doing?

Pretty much everything. A subbie with 12 employees doing shuttering and working on price, Blockie gangers on €2 a block with 20-30 lads laying, pipe layers with a good set up on price, Tarmac contractors completing good volumes, groundworkers on price paid per slab poured knocking out 10 slabs a day, Industrial electricians with good crews wiring units in a day and moving on(I helped wire a complete unit, from scratch in Cork on a sunday once, the subbie cleared 12k for getting it done with everyone paid and the job done to spec). The list is endless. People in that area of work know exactly what I'm on about, others will call bullsh1t. I personally know men who cleared 30k on good days - make of that what you like. There was an awful lot of money to be made but most men bought property with even bigger mortgages, rolled it into bigger businesses that went bust in the downturn and bought shiny diggers and trucks that cost 100k plus each. 1 man I know paid 70k for a track machine, it was stolen a week later and he shrugged and bought another. I sh1t you not.:)edit, I forgot to mention the Kitchen lads - any idea of the boomtime mark up on a fitted kitchen? I saw 150k kitchens fitted that cost the supplier 20k for all and hundreds if not thousands of 25k kitchens that cost 3k to do. I also saw a man buy a brand new transit and 2 hours later ram it to pieces levelling a 20t load of 804 because the digger burst a pipe - he may have been a little hot headed:-)

melekalikimaka

Red_Wake wrote: »

The mark of the peasantry is enjoying the inferiority or misfortune of others.

who said that? a builder?

MadsL

Father Damo wrote: »

tbh there are an awful lot of jobs out there that dont really require the amount of college years one has to acquire to work in said sector. HR for example- it is primarily glorified appointment setting secretarial work, only better paid and requiring 3 years of certified bull to do it.

Admit it, you actually haven't a clue about what HR does?

Let me guess, semi-skilled, unqualified construction labourer emigrated through desperation and misses home. Amirite?

el diablo

Pottler wrote: »

1 man I know paid 70k for a track machine, it was stolen a week later and he shrugged and bought another. I sh1t you not.:

Insurance.

Pottler

el diablo wrote: »

Insurance.

Me hole. If you claimed on a digger stolen after a week you'd never get it again - cash my friend, cash. He wasn't even that p1ssed about it, reckoned it was too light anyway. Another lad I know got a 190k dumptruck that the sales rep said was "unsinkable" and proceeded to wreck it to prove it was "sinkable". After he had paid for it. Go figure.:)

Shryke

Pottler wrote: »

Me hole. If you claimed on a digger stolen after a week you'd never get it again - cash my friend, cash. He wasn't even that p1ssed about it, reckoned it was too light anyway. Another lad I know got a 190k dumptruck that the sales rep said was "unsinkable" and proceeded to wreck it to prove it was "sinkable". After he had paid for it. Go figure.:)

Whatever about skill or ability what you're describing are retarded childish actions. You sound like you have sense yourself.

B.A._Baracus

jam_mac_jam wrote: »

The snobery here is amazing. The nerve of people making lots of money without going to college. It was hardly their fault, it was good timing. People were spending silly money on houses so the people building them were on silly money only fair really.

Its begrudgery. Nothing short.

A great point to make about the current mentality is where was all the public sector moans in 2006 or even 2001 about their wages? ... Hardly feck all. But of course now that alot of people lost their jobs suddenly its a different story and the basis of that mentality is simply "they are earning and I am not, its not right" - same people would of refused to join the council back in the day.

red sean

robbie7730 wrote: »

Same here. Many times I was given stick for not having the flash car etc. Many certainly did buy into it all, but not everyone.

No. They borrowed into it!

K-9

Unavailable for Comment wrote: »

Oh yeah tax evasion happened, especially in the smaller construction firms... as well as every other industry that wasn't on the PAYE system.

However on a publicly funded project like the M7, chances are the contractors would be tax compliant because if they weren't they'd lose their C2 standing meaning no more access to the public money trough. Also it really made no economic sense not to be when the bill was being picked up by the NRA with only the vaguest controls on overruns etc. Giving employees "tax breaks" hardly equates to large enough profits for the firm to take the risk and these firms were never motivated by altruism.



Ah ok. Well if it's made up by overtime then I'd actually feel sorry for him. There are salary and overtime rates his employer would be obliged to pay under the "Sustaining Progress" agreement.

If he was working 8:00 to 24:00 Monday to Friday he'd be pulling in €320 for a 16 hour day. Multiply that by 5 and you've €1600. Added to that a Saturday of maybe 8 to 12 again and he'd have another €480. That's around €2080 and he'll have done 96 hours thereabouts. Average of €21.60 per hour of back breaking labour.

I'm thinking that's not overly well paid for what he's doing. Also I calculated that as if he didn't have to stop for lunches and mandated breaks because they're unpaid so you could take 12 hours off there, dropping his salary yet further. Also God forbid the HSA discovers you've men working 100 hours a week. It's illegal as well as highly dangerous.

If he was getting bonuses for working hard etc, fair play to him. From my memories of working on the sites they were never given out like smarties.

Anyway it's all irrelevant. He needs to cop on to his situation in life at the minute. He's four years out of work. Doesn't matter what he earned if all he has left is vague, inflated memories.

They were minimum rates.

I remember doing up the wage slips for a construction company in 1998, £500/600 minimum 15 years ago, me dreaming of half the wages. Country money was another thing as mentioned previously, tax free expenses. The scrappage scheme was booming at that time as well, credit was freely available.

Some like to portray the bubble as from 02 or so on, it was from 95/96 on, both in housing and retail.

Rabidlamb

I remember at the start of the noughties things (wages) really got going.
Around 2005 an ex-girlfriend got a job in Dunnes as a dept. manager, think she was on about €40k.
She befriended a girl who had been there years in the same role, she was very timid & hadn't asked for a raise in about 6 years, she was still on €16k. :eek:

I myself quit my job in 2002 to leave for a related business (not a competitor) but found my way blocked by my old company offering to near double my wages for less hours, I stayed put for the filthy luker & got into a raging fight with a recruitment consultant who I'd shafted.
About a year after I just got pissed off with work again, I gained the title Bank Holiday Rabidlamb cause of all my missed days.
Sometimes, if the weather was nice, I'd just walk off at 10am to play golf, didn't give a ****.
I was given one written warning & I stared at the manager as I dropped it unopened into the bin in front of him.
Went on the beer after that, didn't come back for the rest of the week.
Came in about 10pm the following Monday where the owner & the managers were fawning over me.
Come into work every now & then wearing a shirt & suit pants & they crap themselves thinking you were off for an interview.
Design Engineer BTW & yes, I was a prick.


For the sake of this country I can never see these years of excess ever repeated, it wasn't natural nor healthy for employees or employers.

tbh

Rabidlamb wrote: »

I remember at the start of the noughties things (wages) really got going.
Around 2005 an ex-girlfriend got a job in Dunnes as a dept. manager, think she was on about €40k.
She befriended a girl who had been there years in the same role, she was very timid & hadn't asked for a raise in about 6 years, she was still on €16k. :eek:

I myself quit my job in 2002 to leave for a related business (not a competitor) but found my way blocked by my old company offering to near double my wages for less hours, I stayed put for the filthy luker & got into a raging fight with a recruitment consultant who I'd shafted.
About a year after I just got pissed off with work again, I gained the title Bank Holiday Rabidlamb cause of all my missed days.
Sometimes, if the weather was nice, I'd just walk off at 10am to play golf, didn't give a ****.
I was given one written warning & I stared at the manager as I dropped it unopened into the bin in front of him.
Went on the beer after that, didn't come back for the rest of the week.
Came in about 10pm the following Monday where the owner & the managers were fawning over me.
Come into work every now & then wearing a shirt & suit pants & they crap themselves thinking you were off for an interview.
Design Engineer BTW & yes, I was a prick.


For the sake of this country I can never see these years of excess ever repeated, it wasn't natural nor healthy for employees or employers.

man I don't know whether to hate you or respect the sh1t outta you.

FTA69

mikemac1 wrote: »

I can even plaster a wall. Not a pro but I'm pretty good

No you can't to be blunt about it. I'm sure you can knock up a board of skim and put it on a wall, but that isn't plastering. Plastering is a trade, one that you must serve a few years of time at in order to learn, and even then you might be sh*t at it still. There is no way that you can skim a wall to an acceptable domestic standard with no training. It's very easy to badmouth the "skill" level of trades such as carpentry, plastering or plumbing but at the end of the day they take years to learn. They're certainly more difficult to learn than completeing an Arts degree in UCC or whatever. Similarly construction is bloody hard work, involving long hours and hard labour.

However, in Ireland construction did in fact go too far. It was 20% of our GDP, twice the levels of our nearest European counterparts; all it was doing was inflating a ridiculous housing bubble. However, that bubble came from the top, it wasn't the fault of 27 year old plumbers or teenage labourers. Personally I think the fact that vast numbers of our young people were sucked into a spiel that has now left them jobless, destituted and untrained as a very sad thing indeed and it's a bit rich laughing at the situation because you may have gotten a job in the HSE or something.

Rabidlamb

tbh wrote: »

man I don't know whether to hate you or respect the sh1t outta you.

Hate away please, I was a scumbag & I realise it.
I graduated in the mid 90's, jobs were easy enough find so most of my class had 5 years experience behind them when the madness kicked off.
Headhunters were ringing you every 2 or 3 months, even when you asked for your CV to be removed.
Golden handshake money was considered the norm, tax free in our industry, bonuses normally came at the end of April (old tax year) & could be another 20% on top of your salary.
Employers were scared sh*tless of losing their top talent, especially to a competitor, employees knew this aswell & many like me abused this power.

I spoke before how I used to deliver free newspapers & flyers in the evenings after work, at one stage I had 3 lads with me paying them €10 an hour.
We'd go out 4 nights a week
Most weeks I'd make €600+ cash in hand for the part time job which I used keep in biscuit tin until it was full.
Never had a chance to spend my salary let alone my part time wage.
I had a contract with outlawed moonlighting but once again my employer didn't want to rock the boat.

This frugalness with money served me well as I never blew it stupidly.
I drove a 10 year old Almera which served me well.
My greatest excess was spending €500 on a guitar which I still play.
I used the rest to pay off a consolidation loan my wife had accumulated before we met & pay a 10% deposit on a modest home.

I never lived it up large in the good times, I know I'll never see that sort of money in my bank account again & it doesn't bother me.
Age & kids has meant I'll never ever be able to commit those hours & effort ever again but it was worth it at the time.
I feel sorry for this era of new graduates but emigration will open new experiences I never had cause I was too busy working.

Anyway, that was all very rambling, I'm the OP on a thread giving out about guys taking home €1,000 a week in the glory days when I realise I was one of them, christ.

Father Damo

tbh wrote: »

I remember a fella at the petrol station in ballymun in the builders boots and the hi-viz, paying for a breakfast roll and a tank of petrol and getting a load of change, which he threw in the bin.

What a legend :pac: Reminds me of Krusty the Clown lighting his cigars with burning 100 notes completely obvlivious to the fact he was nearly bankrupt.

Though why the hell if he didnt want it not just tip the minimum wage petrol station worker?

Big Nasty

Ten years ago I was clearing just shy of €5k a month.

I was 26, lived at home, had no expenses. Blew it all on drink, clothes, cars and holidays. I remember dropping €1200 in Diffney's in one go. €500 spent most weekends. I literally couldn't get rid of it quick enough.

Now I clear about €2.5k have two mortgages and go out for a few pints once a week.

Do I regret it? Not a bit - it was great while it lasted!

Sephiroth_dude

I'll take that job for 12 quid an hour no bother

Sykk

Pottler wrote: »

I well remember sweeping the roads with a brush on a new estate in Finglas while on the other side of the entrance gate people queued up in their cars to buy the houses. We had worked 30 hours straight to get the showhouse finished and were pouring the foundations on 6-8 houses a day as well as digging and laying the sewers etc.
I doubt any one of the people in those cars would have swapped with me at 7am on a rainy, cold winters morning facing into a day lugging pipes, climbing into and out of deep trenches, shovelling 804 and dragging concrete chutes, pouring concrete, repairing machines as and when they broke then carrying on, finishing at 7pm and then do it all again tomorrow, and tomorrow and the next and the next. The attrition rate was huge - new lads would start on a Monday and be worn out and gone by Thurday - if they didn't get the gate on tuesday. Easy money it was not and every penny earned was just that - earned. I have been slogging for 20+ years now and feck anybody who says what was paid to us during the boom was unreasonable, personally, no amount was too much for the work that was put in. It was high for a good reason. It was also available to anybody prepared to work for it.

If you don't want to be shoveling shít then you should have went to college and done a job that not anybody walking down the road could do.

I've no doubt the work you done was hard. I done a couple of "Summers" blocklaying and labouring in the pissings of rain from 6 in the morning to 6 in the evening when I was younger.

However, ANYBODY can do it. If you can put up with the muck and shít you don't require an IQ higher than that of a ham sandwich to do the actual work.

I'm qualified in IT now and I still earn less than what I was earning back then.. Which is ridiculous. My job has much more responsibility now, and though I sit at a desk and it's much less physically stressful, it takes a hell of a lot more brainpower than mixing mortar.

You don't deserve to earn a fortune for that work no more than I deserved it when I was doing it. The ridiculous wages for it have ended and are now and a price where they should be.

Boombastic

Sykk wrote: »

If you don't want to be shoveling shít then you should have went to college and done a job that not anybody walking down the road could do.

I've no doubt the work you done was hard. I done a couple of "Summers" blocklaying and labouring in the pissings of rain from 6 in the morning to 6 in the evening when I was younger.

However, ANYBODY can do it. If you can put up with the muck and shít you don't require an IQ higher than that of a ham sandwich to do the actual work.

I'm qualified in IT now and I still earn less than what I was earning back then.. Which is ridiculous. My job is much more specialized now, and though I sit at a desk and it's much less physically stressful, it takes a hell of a lot more brainpower than mixing mortar.

You don't deserve to earn a fortune for that work no more than I deserved it when I was doing it. The ridiculous wages for it have ended and are now and a price where they should be.

Superiority complex anybody?

Monty Burnz

paddy147 wrote: »

No offence here ......but......

1-How do you know the man is unskilled?

2-How do you know he left school without a leaving cert?

He wasn't necessarily referring to that guy. Plenty of people as described were earning huge money for essentially unskilled work.

paddy147 wrote: »

PS-You need a ticket/licence to drive plant machinery and to me that is a skill.Not everyone can drive plant machinery.

Same as a taxi. Not everyone can do it, but nearly everyone could.

Sykk

Boombastic wrote: »

Superiority complex anybody?

Cop on. Three of my brothers worked in the construction industry and now they're all on the dole, as was I for a time. The high wages weren't deserved.

Boombastic

Sykk wrote: »

Cop on. Three of my brothers worked in the construction industry and now they're all on the dole, as was I for a time. The high wages weren't deserved.

I'd say the physical work and long hours outside in the Irish weather deserve higher wages than a job where turning a computer on an off to fix problems is the order of the day

the keen edge

Sykk wrote: »

If you don't want to be shoveling shít then you should have went to college and done a job that not anybody walking down the road could do.

I've no doubt the work you done was hard. I done a couple of "Summers" blocklaying and labouring in the pissings of rain from 6 in the morning to 6 in the evening when I was younger.

However, ANYBODY can do it. If you can put up with the muck and shít you don't require an IQ higher than that of a ham sandwich to do the actual work.

I'm qualified in IT now and I still earn less than what I was earning back then.. Which is ridiculous. My job is much more specialized now, and though I sit at a desk and it's much less physically stressful, it takes a hell of a lot more brainpower than mixing mortar.

You don't deserve to earn a fortune for that work no more than I deserved it when I was doing it. The ridiculous wages for it have ended and are now and a price where they should be.

That's some smart Ham sandwich.

Have you a number for him? We're thinking of getting a patio done out the back and I'm looking for prices.

Although no doubt he has probably fcuked off to Australia with every other tradesman.

Sykk

Boombastic wrote: »

I'd say the physical work and long hours outside in the Irish weather deserve higher wages than a job where turning a computer on an off to fix problems is the order of the day

What a bright person you are :rolleyes:

mickdw

Boombastic wrote: »

Superiority complex anybody?

He has a point. I know it was quite annoying to be working on sites myself through some of the boom as a fully qualified engineer in a job that held significant responsibility and being paid something the same as a labourer on the same site. For some reason, the mad money all went to the trades and the very senior management. Engineers, on a salary and working 8 to 6 minimum plus some saturdays were not well paid at all so it is very valid to say that the general labour was over paid.

seamus

Sykk wrote: »

The high wages weren't deserved.

There were a number of reasons why wages were so high.

For a start, a lot of these guys did work hard. Estates were being built like there was no tomorrow, so the days were long and you were expected to get **** done.

This in turn meant that you needed a lot of guys - and everyone needed a lot of guys. So if you paid crap wages, any labourer could walk across the road to another site and get a new job in about 30 minutes. Competition pushing prices up.

What exacerbated this was the "developers" themselves. A lot of builders who'd built a few one-off houses got it into their heads that they could be high-rollers and engaged the banks for millions of euro to become "developers" and build a tonne of houses, selling for big bucks. Money literally rolling in, these guys would have little experience of proper financial management of a multi-million euro business and would simply throw money at their sub-contractors to get things done.

The sub-contractors in turn were often just tradesmen with five or ten years individual experience on a site. Seeing how easy his "boss" had it, he'd pitch for a 100-unit job and then have to hastily hire himself a crew and plant, again with **** loads of money coming from the developer and little business experience, they just threw money at the crews to get the work done.

No, the wages weren't justified at all, but at the end of the day these guys had people literally throwing money at them. What else were they going to do?

I remember a friend telling me in 1999 that his school principal had quit his job to work as a foreman on a building site because the wages were better. I was skeptical at the time when he told me, but I can well believe it now, looking back.

Defiler Of The Coffin

From about 2000 until 2008 Sundays in my town were all like St. Patrick's day. The party was in full swing and everyone was having the time of their lives. You never had to ring friends to see if they were going out, you would just show up on a Saturday night or anytime on a Sunday and there would always be someone knocking around. Every Saturday night there would be buses waiting to take people into the nightclub in the adjacent town. I was in college for most of this time, you would have an insane night on Thursday, come home on Friday and do the same all over again on Saturday. One of the pubs in the town changed hands for over a million. This was in a village with just a few hundred people.

I remember builders telling me on a Sunday they were praying for rain so they could keep the session going on the Monday.

Contrast that with today where the aforementioned pub is now in NAMA, another one shut and the ones that remain barely even open their doors until 7pm during the week. Anytime I go home now there's no-one around. I know people that spent a fortune. One of my friends started doing CAD for an engineering company and was driving round in a 4x4 within weeks.

Them days are gone, never to return but boy was it good while it lasted! Some are still feeling the hangover though.

rgmmg

Demand for property drove up labour costs in construction. The majority of folk wanted to make money out of property quickly so needed property built quickly. A vicious cycle. As some mention, they may have taken a back seat during the boom so absolve themselves which is fair enough. Nonetheless, if you're in any profession and someone wants to pay you above the odds for something you do what would you say? And why shouldn't I change my spending patterns given all the learned economists, property programmes, politicians say it can't end. Could similar behaviour happen again? Of course it could. As the Italians say, "Since we're all wrong, no one is wrong."

Defiler Of The Coffin

seamus wrote: »

What exacerbated this was the "developers" themselves. A lot of builders who'd built a few one-off houses got it into their heads that they could be high-rollers and engaged the banks for millions of euro to become "developers" and build a tonne of houses, selling for big bucks. Money literally rolling in, these guys would have little experience of proper financial management of a multi-million euro business and would simply throw money at their sub-contractors to get things done.

Even then you had all these 'developers' who just sprung up out of no-where. They seen the money that was being made and had to get a piece of the pie for themselves. The amount of money that being thrown into housing estates in the middle of nowhere was astonishing. Was there no-one with any cop-on in the banks at the time?

mikemac1

Defiler Of The Coffin wrote: »

Was there no-one with any cop-on in the banks at the time?

There was

But managers were pushing their officers to make sales
The managers had their performance ratings and bonuses to think about
And the directors above them would do anything to jack up market share
And the shareholders who later got wiped out just saw share prices and dividends

And if they didn't do it then someone else would, enter RBS to Irish market to try to get in on a good thing


BOI made a profit of 800 million in just 6 months in 2006. Where is that money now?

ScumLord

Boombastic wrote: »

I'd say the physical work and long hours outside in the Irish weather deserve higher wages than a job where turning a computer on an off to fix problems is the order of the day

Maybe but that's not how it works. If only one guy in a room of 30 knows how to turn the computer on and the other 29 need the computer turned on to start their work that guy that can turn the computer on becomes the most valuable person in the room.

Monty Burnz

Boombastic wrote: »

I'd say the physical work and long hours outside in the Irish weather deserve higher wages than a job where turning a computer on an off to fix problems is the order of the day

By the same token, a person sweating in the kitchen and dealing with cranky customers in McDonalds should get paid more than a guy sitting up in a comfy seat in a crane or JCB or whatever.

You don't get paid based on how pleasant your job is - it's decided amongst other things by what skills are required to do the job, how many people have those skills, and how much demand there is for those skills.

SafeSurfer

I don't think we will ever see a boom like it in this country again.

For 3 reasons.

1. The demand for employees in anything construction related was phenomenal.

2. The amount of money both skilled, unskilled and somebody sweeping rooms and tidying up sites was unbelievable.

3. The number of people with no training, no skills and little education yet in demand for employment will never be repeated. Even the laziest, most useless sh1te realised they could work a couple of days a week and make a few hundred quid.

Boombastic

Monty Burnz wrote: »

You don't get paid based on how pleasant your job is - it's decided amongst other things by what skills are required to do the job, how many people have those skills, and how much demand there is for those skills.

True the demand for skills in the market determines their worth, Why then is it ridiculous then that some one qualified in IT earns less than a ham sandwich of a tradesman. The ham sandwiches skills were in more demand and valued more at the time.

However, ANYBODY can do it. If you can put up with the muck and shít you don't require an IQ higher than that of a ham sandwich to do the actual work..................
I'm qualified in IT now and I still earn less than what I was earning back then.. Which is ridiculous. My job has much more responsibility now, and though I sit at a desk and it's much less physically stressful, it takes a hell of a lot more brainpower than mixing mortar

BattleCorp

To be fair, there's no way that the OP is lying. Plenty of labourers were earning over €1000 per week in the boom. I can vouch for that, I was one of them.

The money was crazy alright, no doubt about that. But the work was hard too. I had to do plenty of overtime to hit €1000.

Pottler is right too about subbies being able to make even more money than that. A subbie with maybe 10 or 20 blocklayers could make anywhere between €200 and €500 per blocklayer per day. It was possible. Especially if you were on a big housing estate where all the houses were the same. The blocklayers would get quicker and quicker the more houses that they built. Plus subbies often charged tradesmen prices to the developer for labourers on the site. They'd charge maybe €500 per day per labourer, tell the developer (if he cared) that they were tradesmen, and pay the labourer €200 and pocket the difference. Easy to pocket big money when this was happening.

It was a supply and demand thing during the boom. If you wanted something done in a hurry, you had to pay through the nose for it.

Were they overpaid? Maybe.

Was it sustainable? Apparently not.

Katgurl

in answer to the OP, yes these people annoy the crap out of me.

i was one of the biggest offenders during the boom in that i made very decent money in one of the most hated and underrated professions (I use the term loosely). Despite everyone in my industry being a pack of useless w@nkers, it was still extremely hard work day in, day out. However when recession hit, I stayed employed whatever way I could, my salary reduced by well over 50%, I didn't care, way better than queuing for the dole. My friends were roaringn laughing when they heard I was working in a eurostore at one stage, I didn't give a cr@p.

A friend of mine was out of work for over a year. She is a semi-skilled professional but her industry is completely saturated. She managed to get an interview for an 8-month contract after her 12 month unemployment stint, they offered her 45K pro-rata on the spot. She flat out refused to even consider it and phoned her recruiter afterwards to tell him she was insulted as her previous role had paid 60K. He was furious and told her he wouldn't try to get her any more interviews if she was going to be so unreasonable and rude to his clients. So she went back to the dole.

Ridiculous.

TwoShedsJackson

Katgurl wrote: »

i was one of the biggest offenders during the boom in that i made very decent money in one of the most hated and underrated professions (I use the term loosely).

Estate agent?

mikemac1

Katgurl wrote: »

i was one of the biggest offenders during the boom in that i made very decent money in one of the most hated and underrated professions (I use the term loosely). Despite everyone in my industry being a pack of useless w@nkers, it was still extremely hard work day in, day out.

Solicitors office?

Katgurl

not solicitor's office, not estate agent but along those lines yes.

munchkin_utd

selling worthless foreign property to gullable eejits that hadnt a clue?

Rabidlamb

Katgurl wrote: »

not solicitor's office, not estate agent but along those lines yes.

Child sex trafficer

Monty Burnz

Boombastic wrote: »

True the demand for skills in the market determines their worth, Why then is it ridiculous then that some one qualified in IT earns less than a ham sandwich of a tradesman. The ham sandwiches skills were in more demand and valued more at the time.

It's ridiculous because it was a symptom of the economic disaster that was underway, the property bubble. It's like asking what was ridiculous about paying a billion dollars for a tech company with no income and no real plan back during the tech bubble - sure, it was in demand, but that was only because all logic had gone out the window.

Of course the problem now is that we seem to have a generation of unskilled people used to making a killing for work that requires no talent whatsoever who seem to think that if they aren't getting paid a grand a week they aren't getting what they deserve so they'd rather sit in front of the telly and wait for the bubble to come back. Which it won't.

ronjo

I am finding this thread mind boggling.

I have worked away from Ireland for 12 years so missed a lot of this but was earning huge money for about 6 years.
I had a great time but I saved a huge percentage of it and bought my house a few years ago for cash and still have money left over.
I dont earn as much as I did then as I took a permanent job but it sounds like there was many many stupid people in Ireland.