8 grand a month?
Actually contractors are worth 8 grand a month. And so are many permanent staff.
£400 a day is a decent rate for an IT contractor. A permie with a similar skill level would probably earn around £40Kpa, possibly more. Given 5 weeks paid holiday (that's 10% of the working year, remember - worth about £4K), sick pay (assume another week or two), decent company pension contributions and employer national insurance payments (at 13% that costs the employer over £5K for this example), plus all the other perks, bonuses and other direct and indirect costs , the actual expense to the employer is much more than £40K. My manager at a FTSE100 company I recently worked at said the cost to an employer is, as a crude calculation, double the salary paid to the employee. £80K is £6.5K per month.
Contractors are still more expensive, yes, but for the extra £1.5K per month the company gets flexibility in their workforce and the benefit of no commitment to the individual, as BT are demonstrating here. The contractors get to trouser a big chunk of what would normally be the employer's employment expenses themselves, and if they chose not to take a holiday or work through sickness to ensure they take the money, that's their business.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
