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0 pointsspaceman_20202y ago0 comments

What’s bizarre is how little professionals care about their safety.

In cities like Delhi, good electricians, plumbers, welders can make $1k+ a month - most of it tax free since they usually work in cash.

Yet, they will never buy any safety equipment for themselves. I’ve seen welders use cheap $5 sunglasses instead of buying protective visors.

There are new apartments coming up in my area, each of which is priced north of $500,000. Yet the laborers working on them don’t have even good quality plastic buckets or wheelbarrows to haul stuff around - they make do with burlap sacks and weave baskets.

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pcthrowaway2y ago

I was also shocked when I visited at the inefficiency and lack of tools for workers comfort and safety in construction.

You would see people working under a flood light at night, with burlap sacks as you said, as well as manual tools that were sorely inequipped for the work they were doing.

It was almost like it was cheaper to just hire someone to beat concrete for 14 hrs/day with a household hammer, for the duration of their life, than to pay $5,000 for a jackhammer and progress 5X as fast.

subtra3t2y ago

> In cities like Delhi, good electricians, plumbers, welders can make $1k+ a month - most of it tax free since they usually work in cash.

Are you sure about that? That would work out to be nearly 10 LPA, which is a good 2-4 lakhs more than what a good electrician would earn in Mumbai, which is a city that is far more expensive to live in than Delhi

spaceman_2020OP2y ago

Yes, sure. My data comes from someone who led this division at Urban Company. The demand for good tradesmen is really high.

The plumber I use is so busy that I have to book him 2-3 days in advance - he’s working on projects all across the city.

There is also a construction boom happening in India right now which has increased demand even more

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