This story begins in September 2019, I had just finished a plastering job at Wolverhampton. The job paid well and I was a little sad to see the end of it but unfortunately nothing lasts forever.
I begin looking for work and end up contacting an agency about some plastering in Birmingham they tell me I can make a start Monday. When I get to the job I am surprised to see there is endless amounts of plastering, the job was a Galliford Try job, part of Project Apple and we were working on a new 13 story, 650 million pound building for the HMRC!
We begin work for Mansell Finishes Limited after they told us to just work direct for them instead of using the agency thinking we could have enough work to last us over a year and being a Galliford Try job for the HMRC we assumed the money was safe, despite the fact they paid fortnightly and not until we had worked a month (meaning they would always have at least two weeks money on us.)
We have no problems on our first payment but we did get a warning, we look around the job and notice there is hardly any Mansell workers on the job! We later find out that 35 polish fixers walked off the job because they had not been paid.
By this time they still have two weeks money on us and we had no idea why they had not paid their already cheap and mostly foreign workforce.
Over the next couple of weeks a few of the Polish fixers come back and we carry on doing our job then comes our first full pay day, its well short.
Mansell pay on a Friday between 2 and 5 o’clock and the office staff just happen not to be in on Mondays meaning we cannot sort the problem until Tuesday.
We get to the office on Tuesday to complain about our wages it is full of people that have not been paid properly, Mansell promise to put it right and after much fuss and BS they eventually sort most of what they owe us.
Mansell claim that the problem was caused by their new paying method and a “lack of day work sheets” I am advised by Mansell’s office staff not to begin ANY DAY WORK JOB without a day work sheet. Day work is actually like swear words to Mansell, they hate paying day work and fail to understand that to pay price work you have to have a high level of organization. For example you cannot say to plasterers (or most other trades) “skim a wall on level 4 after you have done that get to level 7 to skim another and then drop down to the basement to hardwall some concrete walls, and do it all on a price”
The reason that it is unreasonable to expect that work to be done on a price is logistics, carrying tools and scaffolding to these levels is time consuming, the lifts are always busy and we end up spending too much time setting up. A well organized job would allow you to do one floor at a time and remove the need to keep moving equipment, you do not need a certificate in site management to understand that.
But day work sheets and new payment methods were just excuses, Mansell are just a company that HATE parting with their money. I have seen full grown men cry because Mansell are making their lives hell. Every other Tuesday their office is full of people that have not been paid. People driving from London to Birmingham as advised by Citizens Advice because Mansell owe them £16000!
All the other contractors seem to have no problems getting paid, people that are working for Galliford Try are getting paid but Mansell a firm that rely on lots of cheap foreign labour cannot pay their workforce! This is exploitation of both foreign and British workers, Mansell are attempting to get this job done without actually paying for it, are they in financial trouble? Have they under priced the job? Or are they just scumbags trying to make as much money as they can? I don’t know but they are not taking from my family to feed themselves.
Mansell have people start for them, work for the for a few months until they realize that Mansell are criminals that hate to part with their money. They leave somebody else starts and then, repeat.
After 3 months of working for Mansell Finishes, losing money because I have not been correctly paid, losing money because I am having days where I am sitting in the office all day with loads of other people waiting for somebody to sort out my money and not working, I decide to leave and not come back after Christmas surely we can find something better than this..
They underpaid me and my mate our last payment by about £600 each and have not paid us correctly since we started working for them. They owe us about £1500 each and therefore I will not remove this blog until the money is in our banks, if the money does not go in to our bank within 24 hrs I will begin to make a “working for Mansell Finishes” blog in which I will further expose the corrupt, criminal behavior of this parasitic business.
I really hate to do this as Galliford Try seemed like a perfectly reasonable business and would insist that things are done safely and properly, their partners Mansell Finishes Limited on the other hand want everything done as cheaply as possible.
TBC??
