AFAIK, a C45 is the certificate from the tax office for self-employed.
BATU (representing bricklayers and some carpenters) have been campaigning for years for direct employment.
The big building companies want to take on every brickie as an individual sub-contractor. This provides many advantages to the company, and many disadvantages to the tradesmen.
Some of the advantages to the company are:
simpler payroll administration
divided workforce
Some of the disadvantages for the workers are:
complex administration (tax, PRSI, insurance...)
competition among workers
The strategy of the CIF in encouraging this mode of employment seems to be, in the short term, to try to keep labour costs down by passing some of the administrative burden to the workers and forcing workers to compete against each other, but in the long term, to try to undermine the Registered Employment Agreement for the Construction Industry and neutralise the growing power of the trade unions in the construction industry.
While skilled bricklayers can command a very good wage at the moment, this is still just a tiny drop in the ocean of profits the big construction companies in this country have been making for the last 10 years. And they know (particularly the older workers) that the building boom will not go on forever, and that when it ends they will be back to where they were before.
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