I've worked in the construction industry virtually since leaving school. I'm now 43 and in the past 10 years there's been a steady influx of "foreign workers" up to a point, where, in one instance in August 2007, i was sent to St Albans to work on a new car park, opposite the train station. There were at least 300 operatives working there, and i must say i felt like i was working in another country!! Apart from myself there was one other welsh guy, three Scottish guys, twelve from Ireland, and surprisingly there was no more than ten English people there and that included the secretary and management! Everybody else was made up of Albanians, Romanians, Hungarians, Lithuanians, Kosovans, etc etc, and plenty of Mr Singh's from India . Although some of these, mainly the Indians, have been given the '@*!#' work to do, a lot of the other europeans are carpenters like myself. But not being funny i don't know how they get away with it half the time. I was constantly asked how to do this and how to do that, it just pi**ed me off knowing that most of them were blagging it. Of course all the money they were earning, at least 75% of it was going back to their families in eastern europe. And they were taking all the overtime off us British The other problem as well is there are quite a few with false passports, 'Illegals' working on our sites. I was told that dodgy passports were easy to get hold of no matter where you were from
Anyway what i'm saying is there are many British workers unemployed at the moment, including myself (but not signing on, i might add), who are struggling to find work. If they could root out all the illegals that would be a start, and then sent all the immigrants home who committed offences, as Ming said, that should put nearly all our skilled workers back where they belong 'ON SITE', and off the dole.
I was laid off two weeks ago, but instead of wasting time filling out forms in the dole office, and getting pittance in state hand outs I have been looking for work and hopefully i've got a start on the last week of June building a new hospital near Aberdare.
over