- Mar 14, 2004
- 13,626
- 11,875
One of the issues with a project of this scale was always going to be the amount of skilled labour available especially as it seems the tactic was to flood the place with workers to meet some might say an unrealistic timescale.
The construction industry has been going to the dogs for years. I’ve sat on trades courses run by colleges and saw for myself that you only really needed to attend for a certain amount of time before you were issued with a certificate and a pair of safety boots and away you go. Looking at some of the adverts for labouring jobs at the stadium all that was being asked for was a CSCS card which if anyone has ever had to obtain one of those it’s pretty clear that it qualifies you for having a basic level of common sense and nothing more. Unfortunately it would appear that a lot of the labourers were probably given jobs far beyond their capabilities and this is the end result.
Most of these guys were probably used to working on a traditional 2 up, 2 down house but all of a sudden were tasked with building a sports stadium which I think we’d all agree is a completely different kettle of fish.
Long and short of it is that there was never the required amount of skilled labour available to complete the job of this magnitude especially when you consider all the other big construction projects happening at the same time, cross rail etc.
I've been saying this for ages, they went for quantity of workers over quality, it's that simple.