DISHONESTY OF CONSTRUCTION WORKERS

It cuts across borders and any divide in the human condition. Carpenters and builders who are entrusted with the construction of someone’s home steal materials to sell cheaply to other dishonest persons like themselves, or give it away clandestinely to relatives and friends. While the homeowner is at work to earn enough to pay workers, they take the time to socialise and relax, while demanding exorbitant pay for the day’s work.

Most often persons, with a dream of finally owning their own home, with all that this implies, visualize what that home would be like, and plan accordingly. They take into consideration the various cost factors and then apply for a loan, which they know that they will most likely spend the rest of their lives to repay, but they also take into consideration that the alternative is most likely to be paying the same monies to live in a building owned by someone else, subject to every type of discomfort, lack of privacy and individual decision-making in furnishing or refurbishing.
Children cannot play for fear of creating a disturbance to others resident in adjoining apartments. If a spoon falls it can create an instance of abuse from someone who is short-tempered and short on tolerance; and worse of all is the dreaded uncertainty of when the landlord will demand that the premises be vacated.
The Government’s housing drive has provided many Guyanese with a plot of land, which they could never have afforded even after a lifetime of striving, given the extant cost-of-living, and this has precipitated a cataclysmic boom in the housing sector, but the individual stories of many homeowners, who have been robbed in some way or another in the building process, is a tragic indictment on the honour of the society; or rather, the lack of it.
One single mother, busy with a hectic working schedule, entrusted all her money to an out-of-town contractor. He lived on the construction site, employed all his relatives, most of whom had never held a hammer in their lives, and paid them exorbitant sums. He even employed a cook at her expense.
She subsequently discovered that it was an alcoholic family, who spent evenings in the bars of the village, then slept off their hangover until late the next day, working desultorily on her home whenever they could, or working on neighbours’ houses on her time for additional income, with her materials to boot. Whenever the contractor met with her to collect more money he described in glowing terms the progress being made. She, overwhelmed with a packed workload and personal responsibilities, was filled with happy expectations of finally providing her children with their own home after many years of suffering at the mercy – most often the lack, of landlords.
But while he was providing her with receipts, her materials were being diverted to the construction sites of other homeowners, who did not take loans, but who, having a lot of time on their hands to be scavenging the worksites, and with the complicity of someone who had familiarized himself with the topography of the locale and the peculiar circumstances of each new homeowner, and who acted as an intermediary brokering the sales, built their homes by purchasing, at very minimal costs, the materials of absentee homeowners sold to them by unscrupulous contractors.
The brokers’ fee was construction material which, garnered over time, enabled him to build his own home.
When the woman had drawn the last installment of her loan and given it to the contractor, thinking that was for painting a completed house, she took some time off her busy schedule to visit her new home.
To her horror, all that was standing were some walls – no windows, no doors, no cupboards, no washroom facilities, no electrical installation, even the floors and walls had not been capped.
She was neck-high in debt for a house that she had paid every cent of her loan to build, plus invested her own money, and was faced with having to pay hefty monthly mortgage installments, with no home to show for it.
Unable to pay mortgage installments simultaneously with the exorbitant rent she had been paying for her apartment she moved into her incomplete home and practically starved herself for a couple of years in order to make her home habitable. During those years of employing construction workers she has never found one – whether electrician, plumber, painter, carpenter, mason – none who has proven himself honest, either in the delivery of service, or in the security of her materials, despite paying top dollar for that service in the hope that some decency would prevail and she would be accorded top-level service.
The horror-stories are endless. The Government has initiated several skills-development programmes and trained many youngsters in various areas of expertise. These skills need to be harnessed into productive developmental regimes, one of which should be the creation of a skills-bank – or an agency, whereby persons in need of certain services can confidently seek to employ someone whom they would not have to personally oversee, and to have their expectations of honest labour for an honest day’s pay fulfilled.

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