The Contractors Lot, Crooks and Thieves

I have been working as a contractor for about 5 years now and luckily I have been working for 1 company for most of that time. It is a subsidiary of a large multinational and is pretty effiecient and has an integrity policy that i have to sign each year and I have had a few problems with getting paid my expenses and salary but that was just administration, they eventually closed down that office as it was so bad. I have had good treatment and great money for all of that time but they work you really hard. I had a miserable trip last year to Qatar and wanted to try working for someone else. I got a contact through a guy i had worked with and they offered me a job working in Italy for the summer, you can read all about it below. I had a great time and I was part of the Acceptance testing program and i saw the testing and assembly of the equipment i work on in the factory in Florence, but from the first pay statement i got i knew i was going to have problems with the company. They complained about how expensive my accommodation was, they never gave a proper breakdown of my expenses and Salary, I was suspicious from that day on, i asked about a full breakdown and they admitted a missing expense for about $500, i asked about Insurance and was given some bullshit and I then realised i had been working there without any insurance, they never got me any even after all that time i was there. When i realised that i was going to be working in Angola for ever i started planning to leave and i ended up back at my old agency, on better money, nearly three times as much) and with plenty of time off and with a promise of a long term job in Australia with my family. I quit after someone found my blogsite and read about my plans, i was not sure i was going to be paid by the company and in the end the result was they never paid my expenses, I complained and they stopped talking to me; i started complaining to the end customer about my expenses not being paid and they put pressure on the agency, they came up with the small print in my contract and they clawed back some ex-gracia payments i had had for my wife's travel costs and so i still never got anything out of them. I now know that this outfit is typical of all the other small agencies that scrape a living in between the major groups, having a group of about 5 guys, all the usual cast-offs from big groups who cannot get a job with anyone else, small agencies exist by employing guys who are not good enough to work for the big groups, they shave costs by paying crap and not paying certain stuff like insurance, very dangerous game if you have any medical problems. and depending on who is the owner they can be crooks, employing guys and then not paying them, all shady stuff. I was lucky they just shaved me of about $2000 but in the long run i had the better part of the deal. I had a fantastic 4 months in Italy all expenses paid, i got alot of experience. I learned about shady agencies and the oily crooks that run them. The agency i worked with was run by an ex-empoyee of a large mutlinational company but who had been running the far easy group as his own fiefdowm, doing shady deals with accommodation, skimming money from here there and everywhere and is a thorough shady character. he appears really pleasant but under his shiny suits and fancy car, he is a crook and a typical representative of the lower end of the Angency world, They even threatened to take me to court to exact damages if i continued with my complaints to the end customer, they are just full of shit, I wish i could name them here but that would be bad as i would be giving them free advertising, They cannot get into the area of work with the big boys but just picking up the crap left over that no-one else wants, like china and horrible places in the far east, who knows, they may keep stealing money from guys for the next 20 years or the owner may get a bullit from a pissed off contractor.