I was at Ballys casino last night in atlantic city. While walking down the boardwalk around 10pm. I saw a 65ft manlift on the boardwalk and it was extended over the top of the building in a section where I knew was a ton of glass. I had this feeling it was a bunch of window cleaners. I got to the lift as they were comming down. I was totally shocked.
5 guys and not one spoke english. The foreman spoke broken english. I was talking to him about the job and introduced myself as the owner of new jersey window washing. He got excited like I was going to offer him a job. I asked him how much he was being paid. $9.00 per hour. The crew just got a raise because min in the state was raised to a whopping $8.50 per hour. I walked in the casino and told my wife. “That’s why it’s very hard to get large commercial jobs. When you can pay people wages like that and they have huge smiles on their face how can another company compete?”
Thats messed up. You know what, even on military bases they have a prevailing wage sheet and window cleaners on there. We HAVE to pay a minimum of 15.50 per hour!
Just another reason to stay away from commercial accounts.
I average $40-85 on commercial work.
I hope that’s per hour?!
No, that’s total, but my expenses are few!
Well I’m sure we have all been there were you can’t stop looking at glass when inside a place. I was trying to totally focus my time with my wife, but I could not for the life of me stop looking over every glass in the place. I’m at a point where maybe I should go talk to a shrink lol. I can’t even watch a movie without looking to see if the homes in it, have storms or not lol. I watch a flick and say to the wife “That’s a $450 home, it has storms lol.” My eyes would glance left, right and it was driving me nuts. But with that said, all the glass I saw in the place was dirty really bad. In their defense I have been on jobs where not 5 minutes after you have cleaned the thing, someone ruins it. But I was on the 48th floor ocean side and that glass was just gross. What always drove me nuts with those types of places is the amount of glass. Casinos have tons of the stuff and quality control must be a major issue that gets placed lower on the list due to the high volume of people traffic. I can’t see a company placing any type of guarantee with jobs like that. “Yeah we guarantee the glass will be cleaned and stay clean for 1 minute or 5 steps taken by the technitions away from the glass. Which ever is shorter.” :eek:
I know the feeling 
That’s also about the same going rate here.
I suffer from the same disease. My wife can attest to that.
I’ve lost a handful of potential commercial accounts this year because I can’t compete with “the company that hires foreigners for $9.00 per hour”.
