The difference in one line
Labour hire buys you capacity. Subcontracting buys you an outcome. Everything else follows from that.
Where each responsibility lands
Who directs the work day to day
Labour hire: you do. You tell the electrician what to do, in what order, to what standard, the same way you'd direct your own employee. Subcontractor: they do. You define the scope and the outcome, and they decide how to get there.
Who certifies the installation
Labour hire: you do, under your REC — the Certificate of Electrical Safety is yours. Subcontractor: they do, under theirs.
Who carries the commercial risk
Labour hire: you do. If the work takes longer, you pay for more hours. Subcontractor: they do, within their price — a fixed-price package puts overrun risk on them, which is exactly what you're paying a margin for.
Who employs the person
Labour hire: the provider, who pays their wages, super and WorkCover. Subcontractor: the subcontracting business, for its own people.
When labour hire is the right answer
- You're an electrical contractor and you're short of hands, not short of capability
- The scope isn't clean enough to price — it'll be discovered as you go
- You need to flex crew size week to week with the program
- You want your own supervision and your own standards applied
- You need cover for someone on leave, off sick, or who's left
- You want the compliance and payroll load carried by someone else
When a subcontractor is the right answer
- The scope is well defined and can be priced
- You want a fixed price and someone else holding the overrun risk
- You don't hold, or don't want to use, your own electrical contractor registration for this work
- The work is specialised enough that you want their design responsibility, not just their labour
- You have no capacity to supervise
Which one is Grid Force?
Labour hire, only. We supply licensed electricians who work to your direction, on your site, for an hourly rate. We do not take a scope of work, we do not price a package, we are not the Registered Electrical Contractor for your job, and we do not issue Certificates of Electrical Safety. Those stay with you.
So if what you actually need is a subcontractor — someone to own the outcome and certify their own work — we're not it, and we'd rather say that now than three weeks into a job where everyone assumed something different. It's written into our Client Services Agreement in the same words: Grid Force supplies labour only.
The mistake to avoid
Don't engage labour hire and then treat it as a fixed-price package, or engage a subcontractor and then direct their workers as if they were yours. Both muddle the responsibility for supervision, safety and certification — which is fine right up until something goes wrong, and then it isn't. Decide which arrangement you're in, and run it that way.
There's also a third thing that is neither: paying an individual with an ABN by the hour to work under your direction. That arrangement carries real sham-contracting risk. Get advice before you go near it.