To think that tradesmen take the piss with their rates?

[Pomegranatecarnage]

Just that really. I have had a few repairs needed and some DIY recently. I paid £130 to have a leaking toilet valve fixed (it took 45 mins), £75 to have a pull string light replaced (10 mins) and then £270 labour for 6 hours work putting up some shelves, a small area of tiling and replacing skirting boards. He arrived at 10, left at 12 for lunch, back at 2 then was finished by 4pm. I can’t help wondering why I spent 5 years at University to get paid far less per hour as a teacher.

Trades are well paid but that's good for them. They're paid waaaaaayyy more tha my hourly rate as as Dr, hence couldn't afford during my house renovation so me and my partner (IT manager) taught ourselves on YouTube. String lights are super easy to replace, skirting pretty easy once uve bought a mitre box (have done 4 rooms of the house), taught ourselves plastering after getting so annoyed at crappy jobs with holes and tiger stripes everywhere so did the small bathroom ourselves. It's fairly easy once you have the tools, that's the main outlay

Insurance, very expensive tools that need constant replacing and maintaining, petrol, the countless hours spent quoting, sourcing parts and collecting materials... you're getting a good deal.

Absolutely right.
A lot of university degrees are an utter waste of time and money nowadays.

Skilled trades, especially if a person has a natural talent for it are much more useful and lucrative.

@Pomegranatecarnage These trades need relevent qualifications, including English and Maths and several years to qualify.

I bought a leather item recently, custom made, the person who made it won awards for their saddlery skills, their hand stitching is beautiful.
Standards are incredibly high for a lot of the skilled trades.

If you take into account all the tax-payer benefits teachers get, that self-employed people have to fund themselves (pension, sick pay, holiday pay, providing themselves with tools for the job), of course he's going to charge more per hour than you earn.

We very luckily found a great plumber who I just trust, and who recommends tradesppl to us (we have for sure been stung with bad work--we just found out a pipe we paid someone to remove from an external wall was instead hammered back into the wall and has come right through the internal plaster in a bedroom 😾). Anyway, this good plumber charged us 70 for the leaky valve. We're not in a city but reasonable sized town so maybe that's something to do with it, but yeah, almost half the price you were quoted!

Always good to get three quotes ahead of work, but even getting people to show up after agreeing to do the work is incredibly difficult. I'm going to learn to repoint lime mortar as I just can't face another person destroying our gable wall further! (Though I'm already a skilled worker so practical in that way).

How much an hour would you charge to tutor a child for their entrance exam? £20? £25? I bet you laugh at someone paying those prices to you no?

OP as a teacher who presumably wants a pay increase you should not be assisting tax dodgers, or do you think you should get a pay increase and also at the same time not have to pay any tax? I really hope you don't teach maths or economics.

I think your educational snobbery is showing, op. A skilled job is a skilled job - and the demand for tiling, building, plastering, electrical work, etc is huge. If your teaching salary is a cause for concern (and actually, I don't disagree) then campaign and lobby for better teaching pay, don't whinge about the cost of skilled manual work. It's not a race to the bottom.

We charge £95 + VAT per hour in hours for domestic jobs. £110 + VAT for weekends and after hours. Our equipment is very expensive, our insurance costs a bomb and the guys have to be well trained. Plus no-one really wants to deal with what they have to deal with, so we pay well. 😁

If you don’t want to pay the going rate for skilled tradies then YouTube is your friend…or not 😉

Brilliant. You think you’re smarter than these people, and yet….

£270 for 6 hours is cheap. It’s basically a full day’s work including travel, admin and sourcing materials.
Can I have the name of your tradesman please?

Yanbu op.

But the way around it is to start doing it yourself.

It's no where near as onerous as you might imagine for many jobs. You just need the right tools and you tube.

Only pay for the jobs that actually do need training/skill.

Do you factor in your employers' pension contributions in your figures?

How about the earnings you're losing when you spend time learning and doing trades work when you could have been working in your own jobs and earning money?

You really can't compare a wage against the charges of someone self employed. It's like comparing apples and a brick!

I am a senior scientist in the pharmaceutical industry, I spent over a decade at ancient universities doing degrees and post docs before I moved to the pharmaceutical industry. I'm sure @Pomegranatecarnage can accept I am highly educated.
We do contract work for other pharma companies and they get charged many multiples of my headline salary for my time. Why? Because of all the overheads that surround what I do. The NI, pensions, tax, buildings and heating and cleaning, the equipment and maintenance, all the non-customer facing staff that do vital work. I am just the tip of the iceberg of the costs associated with the work we do. And that's not taking into account the scarcity of my skills and the premium people pay to work with me. Tradesmen are no different in that respect, they just have less job security and fewer employment perks.

I really get fed up of people with very secure public sector jobs with stonking pensions who think they are hard done to because they can't tell the difference between the rate tradepeople charge and the money they take home.

We only pay for things we definitely can't do eg complex plumbing, electrical and gas work. People who do that work are skilled and have a lot of overheads. Yes there are plenty of crap ones, like any profession (including teaching) however once you get a reliable one they're ace.

Everything else we do ourselves - painting, putting up shelves, tiling etc. I use YouTube and other sites.

We need more young people to go into trades, attitudes like yours are part of the reason they aren't.

I pay my cleaner more per hour than I earn myself, despite the fact that I have a university degree and they don’t.

Those are their rates, I want their service, I don’t want to do it myself and so I pay it. They do an amazing job and I appreciate and value them.

There was no quote

That's on you then, if you don't shop around there's a chance you'll be ripped off (not that I'm saying you were overcharged in this case).

Love how you acknowledge prep time for an hours tutoring but not all the not unpaid time for tradesmen ie admin, collecting supplies, travel and quotes etc.

If it was easy to learn and complete these tasks to a high standard there would be less demand.

£270 for tiling, shelves and skirting seems like a bargain. If you wanted the moral high ground re cash in hand you should have chosen someone else and paid full price.

Seems to me the issue really is that OP didn't get a 'mate's rate' from the neighbour.

Good luck with this post OP. I posted something similar a while ago and the comments were plain nasty. I'm not sure what people get out of demonstrating their pug faced stupidity online but there you go, it's the modern world.

@Pomegranatecarnage those rates don't sound too bad to me. The only issue was the cash in hand aspect but you don't know if it was declared or not and probably shouldn't make that assertion.

Rather than listing what tradesman have to do around their jobs as so many others have, I'm going to focus on yiur employment benefits paid in addition to your salary:

Pension - 28.9% employer contribution
Death in service benefits - very generous
Sick Pay - very generous, probably 6 months full, six months half
Holiday pay - generous allowance compared to statutory 28 days
Mat pay - variable
Regular monthly income
Working mostly in the warm

One thing I don't understand is yiur tutoring rate. DD is only 26 and teaches secondary English. She is turning down tutoring jobs and has a waiting list. The going rate is £75 for 45 minutes. I'm also surprised by her salary which is more than I thought it would be.

Please don’t degrade a skill because they didn’t go to university.
My husbands trade took 5 years being on the tools as an apprentice to learn. At least, if he went for an interview and was up against someone with the same degree qualification he would know his arse from his elbow and how to use a spanner.

I'm not sure why the OP thinks her teaching degree is any more important than the qualifications a tradesman has but there you go.

I am so glad DH and I learnt how to do a lot of the basic DIY jobs ourselves from our parents and then made sure DC's were involved whenever we did DIY jobs ourselves so can now do much of their own work.
Perhaps the finish may not be as good as a professional and may take longer but it is not always easy to find someone you can rely on. Some of the rental properties that DCs have lived in have been atrocious and these have been described as newly refurbished - looks pretty but can only be described as all fur coat and no knickers.