Ways we could have come a cropper.
Sunday, September 7, 2014 @ 2:51 PM
A while after the casa was finished, I was reading in the newspaper about an empresario who was imprisoned for a year because a Romanian man working for him had fallen two metres from scaffolding. The case took six years to get to court. Apparently, the Spaniard bribed the Romanian to say that he had not been working for him and he paid his hospital bill of 3,000 euros (the man had to have five operations on his foot). The socalled entrepreneur received a year in prison and a fine of 3,600 euros for crimes against the rights of workers, ‘lesiones imprudentes’ (injuries as a result of negligence) and bribery.
A similar fate could have befallen thousands of people all over Spain who had work done on their houses; it could have happened just if a person had an accident when replacing a missing roof tile, for instance. I used to watch Benji and the others up on the roof, not taking any safety precautions.
'Benjamin! Shouldn't you be wearing a harness?' I'd call.
'No! No es necesario!' he'd call back.
As it turned out, had any of them had had an accident, we could have ended up in jail. Thankfully, I was blissfully unaware of this (and of course we would have been more than happy to pay for harnesses).
Benji was also completely set up as a builder with all the equipment, cement mixers, scaffolding, tools and so on, so I thought: how come he'd get off scot-free like we were exploiting him and we'd have to pay him a stack of compensation and land in jail? We were just employing a builder to build our house.
One good thing about reading all of these stories in the local paper, Ideal, was that we were often so relieved that we hadn’t ended up in the same position as some unfortunates (and I count the empresario among these).
To see our current properties for rent take a look at the following. There is plenty of availability from September onwards at DISCOUNTED
rates:
http://www.homeaway.co.uk/p86636
And also another of our completed projects:
http://www.homeaway.co.uk/p475271