DemolitionNews hits back over criticism of its Gabor Prudencio story.
At the beginning of this week, we brought you the exclusive story of Gabor Prudencio, the man who has travelled to the UK from Bolivia to hone his skills at the cutting edge of the global demolition industry. The story followed his visit to last week’s Institute of Demolition Engineers’ spring seminar at which Prudencio was warmly welcomed by all. Judging by the number of people that have read his story and listened to his interview, that welcome has been largely repeated here.
Late last night, however, that changed when we received an email that reads (and the spelling and punctuation are as supplied):
“…you have to be jokeing , us proper English people cant get jobs never mind imagrants, please think again before you put something like this on the web again…”
Now, under normal circumstances, we would have preferred to respond to this directly. But the person that sent this beautifully crafted message chose to use a fake email address that simply bounces our messages back. So instead, we thought we’d respond publicly to lay out our own personal feelings on the matter.
For one thing, the people behind DemolitionNews.com are precisely the same as those behind Demolition-Jobs.co.uk, a website that we funded almost entirely ourselves in order to help British demolition workers find alternative employment. Although this website has helped numerous British people back into work, particularly after the collapse of the Controlled Group, it has never earned us a farthing and never will.
Secondly, all of the people in the industry that we truly admire share one common bond beyond demolition – an incredible passion for their work backed by an impressive work ethic. We firmly believe that Gabor Prudencio shares those qualities.
Furthemore, DemolitionNews.com is a global website. And while Gabor’s story is, of course, UK-based, it would be hypocritical and ridiculous of us to keep at arms’ length any foreign nationals when two thirds of our readership and more than half our income is derived from beyond British shores.
But – and here’s the kicker – we firmly believe that UK demolition contractors want the best possible staff for their companies, and that they have the screening and filtering systems in place before, during and after an interview to sort the wheat from the chaff. That means that they are well-equipped to sort through any array of races, creeds, colours, religions and sexual orientations to find the worker that they believe best suits their requirements, whether that person is British, Jamaican or naturalised Bolivian.
In short, we encourage discussion and debate here and on our DemolitionNews-Forum website. But we will not tolerate this kind of xenophobia.