Dave, I know EXACTLY what you mean, I've been in that same position. My last job, is when I started with my municipality, was collection system maintenance, essentially repairing sewer pipes and manholes. It was a regular thing for 1 guy to be in the hole uncovering the pipe, and 3 others (4 if the supervisor showed up to check on us) would be standing around watching him.
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1. It's a safety hazard to have more than one guy in the hole digging, often times you would only
need one guy to uncover the pipe, 2 guys would bump into each other when trying to work. A lot of the time, if we were ALL standing around, it's because we were taking a break, I mean, we
could keep working and pass out from heat exhaustion...it wouldn't matter to us, we'd still be getting paid by the hour and on the job injury we wouldn't have to pay the medical bills out of our pocket...I may be exaggerating, but I mean really, what's cheaper, a 15 minute break for a crew, or someone ending up in the hospital? You get the idea.
2. Usually we would have 1 Crew leader, 1 Equipment Operator, 1 Dump truck driver, 1 "worker" (that's what I was for a while). Having said that, all of the above did a little part when it came to the physical part of the work, the hand digging part in our case. But in order to knock jobs out in one day, you needed an extra guy for dump truck so he could run to dump and bring material as necessary, an operator to operate the equipment while the dump truck was out, he could continue to excavate. The crew leader and worker would "spot" for anything that the operator may not be able to see while he was digging. So you look at it that way, and it makes sense. It wasn't uncommon for crews to be short the "worker" guy making it a 3 man crew. You could not perform jobs with anything less than a 3 man crew. For safety purposes of course.
3. Contractor who the municipality would hire, would probably charge us 3X what it cost the municipality to just do it in house. The contractor would then have a bunch of guys "just standing around" and the tax payers (or customers) would end up paying for it anyways. The only difference is, instead of a City Seal, they have a company logo so people don't pay as much attention to it.
4. I make a substantial amount less than a friend of mine who is my age does working for a construction company does. I'm guessing, he probably makes 3-4 bucks more an hour than I do, plus, it's not uncommon for him to get 60+ hours a week. We normally would make a little bit of O.T., but nothing like private sector has to offer.
I remember a job I got called in for once. One of our 3 man crews was working on it (and keep in mind, we
did contract out a lot of jobs that we didn't have the proper equipment to work on, we did a lot of "small" jobs, but the bigger, massive construction jobs, the municipality would contract out) and it ended up being more than they could manage, the contractor came in to do it and most of it had already been excavated by our crew, but the contractor had like 8-10 guys show up. 2 guys to unload a pump, 4 guys who looked like "workers", 2 guys looked like crew leaders or something, and an engineer or supervisor looking guy. A bunch of them were "just standing around" for the remainder of time I was on site and I wondered "Man, how much are these guys gonna charge us?" I can't even imagine, but I doubt they got any dirty looks from the public.
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Also, I do live within the service area of the municipality, so you could say I "waste" my own money!