The Main Contractor was a big boy with lots of friends working for him. The Subcontractor was honest, hard working, and just wanted to do a good job and get paid; construction was his game.

The Main Contractor said one thing but did another, he was friendly in conversation and yet unfriendly when he asked his QS to write e-mails and letters. He expected the Subcontractor to jump when told to jump, and to find extra labour whenever he decided they were needed, even though there was no need for more men.

The Main Contractor’s works were in a mess, because the design was poor and his site organisation was….well, what organisation? Inevitably, as usual, he was well behind his programme and facing a big bill for liquidated damages from his Client. So he threw money at the job, whilst his QS thought to himself “the Subbies would have to pay”, after all, “they are the ones doing all the work so it must be their fault that we are late and losing money”. The Main Contractor’s QS was very clever, and he was a legal expert, or so he said – and he would make sure that the Subcontractors paid.

The Subcontractor kept at his job, despite having to work haphazardly, and being forced to move around the site just to keep his men busy. What happened to the original programme of starting at one end of the job and working logically to the other? It just never happened, even from the beginning.

Then, towards the end of the job, the Subcontractor noticed that his payment applications were no longer being paid in full. His cash flow was suffering and at the same time the Main Contractor was still shouting for more men, and now for overtime working as well!

The Subcontractor noticed that each month the Main Contractor was deducting an increasing amount of contra-charges, and it seemed that the figures were plucked out of thin air, and strangely, added up to enough to make the Subcontractor’s payment next to nothing.

But what the Contractor didn’t realise was that the Subcontractor also had a friend. The friend was a big guy who knew his stuff; he explained that it was not the Subcontractor’s job to prove that the contra-charges were unjustified, the Main Contractor himself had to prove that his deductions were justified and correctly calculated. How could the Subcontractor disprove the figures anyway, he had little idea of how they had been made up.

The Subcontractor’s friend said he had seen this situation many times before, not to worry and to leave it to him - he would go with the Subcontractor to explain politely to the Main Contractor how things really were. He said that whenever he had gone with his other Subcontractor friends, to knock on a Main Contractor’s door to talk about contra-charges (armed with his weapon which he called Adjudication), the Subcontractor had always returned with a sack full of his previously unpaid money. So that’s what they did.