Originally published at: Watch: Contractor says he wasn't paid, so he rented an excavator to tear up apartment he just built | Boing Boing
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Are housing prices doing the same thing in Germany (or anywhere else) as in the US?
Pay the people you hire.
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I cannot imagine the outcry of our German petrol heads if he had used a Tesla and not a Volvo.
BTW: using “Bild” resources is like linking to Fox News, only worse. The worst tabloid (by far) we have here in Germany. I would strongly recommend to not mention this shithole media ever again to not give them even more publicity.
To quote Max Goldt:
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My tiny little cleaning company used to clean a small factory along with their offices and all public bathrooms 7 days a week. I paid my crew weekly. At one point they were into me for over 10 grand. They were finally told if there is not a check on the desk tonight we’re done. I got there, no check, we went home.
They called the next day, “What happened? Oh, you were serious?” They got me a check a day later. “Will you come back?” Sure if you pay a week in advance every week. That job ended.
The problem when people owe you money, especially for services or things you can’t repossess is if you walk away you risk never getting paid. Even if you do sue, it’s going to cost time and money us little guys just don’t have. They count on that.
This guy was a tad bonkers though, he had other recourse first.
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The owners of the apartment building claim that they had paid the contractor the full amount minus 1.4% for construction defects.
So… is that not true, or was he mad about the 1.4%? It’s hard to believe he would have done that over less than 2% of his payment, but then again, anyone who would go on that kind of rampage when there were surely more productive options open to him…
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Aaaaand… fences go up at Mar-A-Lago.
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If this was the standard response to wage theft, then wage theft wouldn’t be larger than all other forms of theft combined.
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But who will raise the fences? Maybe for payment in advance.
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Also, according to the article, they apartment building claims they paid 98.6% of the bill, the rest withheld for defects. They could of course be lying or misrepresenting (maybe they paid everyone but him 100%), but if you hire a contractor and they don’t finish the job correctly, withholding the final payment until it is fixed, the dispute is resolved, or if the contract or local law allows, deducting your repair / rework costs is a totally normal thing to do.
I’ve also seen the case where owners don’t pay their contractors for weeks or even months, and I can at least sympathize with people upset over that. But given the response of trying to demolish the building, I’m inclined to distrust his representation of the facts in this case.
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Plus it sounds like he was docked payment for incompetent performance, not that he was “not paid”.
We don’t know if the docking was a ruse, but 1.4% seems like a paltry amount: if the building owner was being deceitful, wouldn’t he take a lot more than 1.4%?
I don’t see why we give the vandal the benefit of the doubt. It’s much more likely he is what he appears to be: an incompetent, immature, impulsive criminal.
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English translation courtesy of Google:
This newspaper is an organ of wickedness. It is wrong to read it. Anyone who contributes to this newspaper is totally socially unacceptable. It would be a mistake to be kind or even polite to any of their editors. You have to be as unkind to them as the law just allows. They are bad people who do wrong.
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Mar-a-Lago already has walls around it. Looks like a Guard Tower in the parking lot, as well, so I think the term ‘gated compound’ would apply.
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i’m surprised this happened in Germany, honestly. i was fully expecting FL or something, since this sounds more like an American solution than anything else.
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Ah, the case of the Killdozer, truly a modern classic.
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Yeah, Germans alao like to think that the US are such a terrible cesspit of rotting infrastructure and aggressive behaviour… Noone would expect this to happen in their proper and nice and friendly German neighborhood.
Ok, this one time, that’s surely a total exception. Right?
Riiiight…
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Can we just, like, reverse the polarity or something?
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