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Olympic site gangmaster's £300,000 pay 'scam'
Tom Lawrence07.09.09
Transport for London is investigating claims that a gang master conned labourers working on a major Olympic transport link out of hundreds of thousands of pounds.
Building contractor Paul Singh allegedly paid staff working on the Tube's East London line extension as little as a third of the amount of money he was actually charging for them.
Between April 2008 and March this year he pocketed £300,000 through exploitation, while his team of 15 earned about minimum wage.
He was contracted to provide the staff by Woulfe and Son, a firm sub-contracted by Balfour Beatty/Carillion, the consortium which won the £363 million contract to build the first phase of the project.
"Mr Singh was allegedly getting £155 per man per day while paying them around the minimum wage [£5.73 per hour] which allowed him to make around £6,000 per week for himself," said a TfL spokesman.
"TfL seeks the highest standards of employment practice from all our contractors.
"We have instructed Balfour Beatty/Carillion to carry out a thorough investigation."
Reader views (2)
There are several groups in the UK that try to look out for the interests of contract workers such as these, and from those I follow on the net, just about every piece of quite sensible advice offered to the government has been more than quite forcefully thrown back in their faces, the government have actually created new laws and taxes to make the working conditions of such people worse.
This story covers just one gangmaster and only 15 workers, and really is just the tip of a huge pile of nastiness the government seems to have gone out of its way to encourage.
- Threaded, Roskilde, Denmark
Every gangmaster employing casual foreign labour, should be slammed down on hard by the law if caught exploiting workers. Supplying cheap illegal migrant labour particularly, fuels demand for the people traffickers. In the last year, we've seen TV documentaries of Chinese illegals and Sikh illegals and the squalor and grim misery these workers live in. On promises of lucrative work here, they sign on to pay out vast some to be trafficked, only to be exploited (often by their own countrymen) on arrival. Once here, they become like the victims of loan-sharkers, paying out whatever is asked of them and powerless to live a life other than as a bond-worker.
- J V S, London
