Gentlemen... I do want to hear what it actually cost to permit me to work at a nuclear plant. Please feel free tom post the number of postions that is required to allow me to work, the percentages of what pay I support others and the amount of profit that I loose to the company.
I know that I am being payed less than what is billed for me... I just think that there could be an increase in efficiency on the company's part.... one tht would raise the tech's wages and encourage better performance.
Sorry I hit a sore nerve... and yes, I do think I deserve more. Yes, I agree to work for the wages I sign on for, gladly so. And yes, I enjoy the work I do.
I do not do all the work, I said we. I do work hard and give 110 % no matter where I sign on.
Mr. Bartlett... I still enjoy working for your company, but I honestly think that there should be an increase in the techs wages and that Bartlett could streamline their operation.
LaFeet - Please don’t get me wrong, I was attempting to educate you and others on what it takes - I probably went about it a little to adversarial...anyways take or leave what I have to tell you, it is your choice.
Most companies Bartlett's size operate with twice the overhead Bartlett has - we have streamlined about as far as one can and still function - for example the biggest complaint I hear out there nowadays is its damned hard to get thru to a recruiter - that’s because we are operating with less recruiters than we had in the 90's but staffing almost twice the amount of work - and that’s not just tightening up on recruiting but all of the departments here in corporate. That’s one of the main reasons why we were so attractive to our new owners, we did more with less.
Most mark-ups in this industry are as Mike pointed out are anywhere from 22% to 40% based on different variables - for example a solo gig may call for a higher mark-up to justify its worth where as on a multiple person contract the mark-ups are pitifully low so we are not making a whole helluva lot of money off the individual but as a group we turn a profit. Kinda like asking one person for 10 dollars as compared to asking 10 people for 1 dollar - you get the same amount of money, it just takes allot more people to get you there. HP and Decon contracts in this industry (commercial) are notoriously low mark-ups.
Anyways getting back to the original question I had asked "what to you is a fair portion 75%, 80%, 90%" I was looking for an answer because right now on the standard outage you are keeping anywhere from 75% to 80% or more of the billing rate. So for simplicities sake lets say we have a billing rate of 10/hr and you keep 75%, or $7.50. The other 2.50 now has to cover all of the items Mike listed - FICA. Workman's, Medical, Holidays (the utilities rarely pay holidays on the standard HP outage contract, but they will dictate to us which one we must pay), General Liability. Medicare, PPE. Fed Unemployment, and State Unemployment plus we have to pay the people that hired you, badged you(at most sites), paid your diem(oh and in case you were not aware Perdiem, travel and other misc. expense related items are a direct pass thru meaning we bill what we pay out not more so the only thing we can turn a profit on is the hourly rates), paid your hourly, handled your insurance, billed the utility so we can pay your diem and hourly, typed your resume, etc.. plus we have other expenses such as heat in the winter, computers, phone bills, electric bills, leases , mortgages and or property taxes. Then we have the non billable people out there that we need to pay such as most admin assistants on site during outages, regional managers that are an integral part of paying homage to clients, some site coordinator slots, etc... So to look at it in perspective I have 1 person working at Plant X, my markup is going to be high to pay all for that where as I have 75 RP's working an outage my mark-ups are real low because we aren’t looking for the gross profit on one tech to pay all of the above and more, we are looking for the combined gross profit on all of the techs to pay all of the above.
Believe you me when it comes to making more money as an individual I am all for it, as I’ve said in the past the more I can pay the more you make plus the more I can bill thus the more we make. Its allot easier to staff a job paying 28/hr and 110/day as compared to 22/hr and 85/day. I understand where you are coming from on this but until our clients give us a "the sky is the limit" billing rate we are stuck trying to squeeze pennies out of each billable slot in hopes that those pennies add up to dollars. The day they don’t is the day we go under.
Eric
PS I am glad you enjoy working for us and I'm gald that you have asked the questions or made the statements you did. Keep up the questioning and if i dont know the answer I'll make up a great BS story

just kidd'n if i dont have the answere i'm sure someone like Mike, or Biercourt, or one of the many other posters will jump in to explain how things work.