Your having a laugh aint you, the large scale commercial sector is where its happening the most, one bunch of monkeys installing the unistrutt, another doing the cabling, another for containment, another for second fixing
with only a handful of skilled people at the top taking the lead
its big commercial companies that have designed it to be this way!
for every real electrician on site there are a half dozen 'mates' or installers
again the only ones making any money are the blokes at the top taking on the contracts
You know on reflection your absolutely right.
Having fitted out several well known German supermarkets.
We suddenly found we could no longer compete when tendering.
They ended up using a polish company who flew there workforce in.
2 months after completion we were called to investigate a number of electrical problems.
I remember one issue was with the lighting.
The shop floor, offices, and ware house had 3 stage lighting that was, or should have been, controlled by modem from head office.
They were getting communication but the controller was only working manually.
The reason was the IT guys had done there bit, but the polish sparkies had by passed the control gear so it was controlling sod all ???
It gets better.
In the spec we had tendered for.
Containment was supposed to be galv conduit, trunking cable tray swa's ect.
They had spider wired flexi armoured all across the roof void !!!
A plate of spaghetti would look neater.
At least it explained to us why we couldn't compete on price.
And when we put a complaint in to the consultant company they just shrugged and said they agreed with our findings but unfortunately the whole scenario is somewhat political.
We knew that politics played a big part because, most of the lighting fitted on the last job was tamalite (as per spec)
And when the snagging list came back to us, we were told we had to remove the union jack from every single fitting.
How the hell do you compete with our european cousins with this kind of nonsense going on.
I still feel the guys working in the Domestic sector are getting a very raw deal with all this though.