Sign that 2012 Olympics will be a bust?

From an article in the The Times, November 14, 2007, "Why builders are refusing to join race for Olympic jobs".

This article was about how many "building contractors are refusing to put in bids for venues at the Olympic Park because the projects carry too much risk and too little profit". It goes on to discuss how "...the Olympic stadium and the aquatic centre have attracted just one bid each."

According to the article, there is a lot of construction in England (mainly London I gather) and the contractors do not want to deal with the bureaucracy involved. With fewer constractors bidding it is feared that prices will be higher than what was predicted (which seems to be very common with big UK projects). "...the Olympics Minister, admitted last year the costs had already trebled to 9.3 billion (pounds), partly because of escalating construction costs."

Prices will also increase because of "Tough employment conditions built into contracts - including direct labour, local labour and stringent health and safety regulations...". From what I know about construction in England (which is not as much as I had hoped, but more than what I had known), the contractors are going to have to hire people directly, not through agencies (remember, they do not have union hiring halls here), hire local workers (not all Polish and Eastern Europeans who will work for peanuts a day - sound familiar my fellow Americans?).

This quote sums it up, and shows that England has the same problems as America when it comes to leadership, especially in construction: '"There are also a whole group of DCMS (Department for Culture, Media and Sport) civil servants without any operational responsibility. They are only there to make sure that other people are doing their jobs, which an lead to complete inertia. There is no clear leadership at the top so no one makes decisions."'

It will be interesting to see if London can put on a decent Olympics without pissing away the UK GDP for the next two years. Especially since China is apparently going to have an excellent Olympics (I will be boycotting because I don't agree with giving the Olympics to a country that massacres its citizens who organize for democracy. Anyone ever hear of Tiananmen Square in 1989). But it is easy to do when Your people make a dollar an hour, there is no health and safety, and you can imprison anyone who complains.