Building trades have poor pension provision

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https://www.ft.com/content/7c5edcf3-ba22-4f86-8552-1bdd6fe1063a

"Less than a quarter of workers in the sector are saving for retirement, according to government figures"

"Fewer than one in four blue-collar construction workers are saving into a workplace retirement plan, according to data that shed new light on the growing pensions crisis facing the self-employed.

Figures obtained from the Department for Work and Pensions show that just 23 per cent of construction workers, including skilled trade occupations and plant and machinery operators, are “participating” in a workplace pension.

About 349,000 blue-collar workers in the sector were signed into the company pension plan, out of 1.5m in total, according to the data. This contrasts with more than 10m employed workers automatically enrolled into a company pension plan since 2012.
“These figures show that the government’s auto-enrolment pension policies are failing construction workers,” said Gail Cartmail, assistant general secretary of the union Unite, which obtained the figures through a Freedom of Information request. “This failure will result in hundreds of thousands of construction workers being forced into poverty when they retire.”

Roughly half of blue-collar construction workers are officially registered as self-employed and therefore not eligible for auto-enrolment, according to Unite."
 
None of this is surprising unfortunately. The vast majority of tradesmen in construction are self employed. Such as myself. We have very little rights as compared to employees such as work based pensions, holiday pay, redundancy, sick pay etc. The travesty is , from my experience at least, that many of my colleagues in construction are employees in the guise of being self employed. It's a tax fiddle and a convenience afforded to the employer/contractor at the expense of 'subcontractors'(employees). I know of subcontractors working on a fixed day rate for years with the same company. Even labourers ,on a fixed hourly rate, working for an agency through an umbrella company to make them appear 'self employed'. Zero hours contracts is recent news but this has been going on for years and years in the construction industry.
 
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