DIGGER, voice for good or SWP polemic?

[Real Job]

Hi 1man,

You list two big reasons why wages/conditions/quality went up with the advent of PPG16
-greater demand for archaeologists
-increased expectations of developers for professional staff

I agree with you, but I do not see that the introduction of competitive tendering - and hence the competition between units that keeps wages low and contracts short - was the only possible solution to these issues. It may have been the politically expedient solution at the time, but that is a different matter.
There is no necessary connection between raised wages and professionalism and the free market, they just happen to have happened at the same time.
Don't get me wrong, PPG16 was a change for the better unquestionably, but not because it introduced (or rather formalised) competitive tendering...

[Post-Med Potterer]

RealJob writes...

quote:There is no necessary connection between raised wages and professionalism and the free market, they just happen to have happened at the same time.

quote:think many diggers see the market in archaeology as being the scource of low wages, short contracts, shoddy archaeology and all the other ills that get discussed on this forum.

Hmmm. I think you have got the answer in your own statements!

The free market is a mechanism by which the purchaser of goods or services chooses who provides those services. That choice is made by looking at a variety of factors - price, professionalism, experience, location, efficiency are all among them. As consumers we are all looking to get 'best value', which may not mean the lowest price.

Therefore a vibrant free market in any product will support both

1. high-end professionals who pay higher wages, offer pensions, training and other benefits - and therefore attract better staff who do better jobs and therefore can charge higher fees...

2. ...people who charge as little as possible, pay peanuts, give their staff no training or benefits and do a crap job.

Archaeology is no different from any other profession in this regard. Next time you have your boiler serviced you will choose a plumber or heating engineer who you think offers best value of professionalism versus cost. Next time you get your car serviced you make the same choice.

So as long as there is a free market then both ends of the spectrum will exist. And talking in this way about a free market does not make me a Thatcherite, it is simply acknowledging the reality of Western society in the twenty-first century.

[1man1desk]

PMP,

Good points, well presented, I think I agree with everything you say.

I should point out that when archaeology went private/commercial/competitive, I was viscerally opposed to it. I have changed my view as time went by, simply because I saw the improvements in archaeological practice and in resources (money) available that came about as a result.

In an entirely public-sector, public-funded system, the parent public body will always have other priorities for spending its money, so archaeology will get shafted (as it used to do before PPG16).

However, if you say the developer must pay (which is only fair), then you can't in fairness tell them: we will specify the scope, appoint a contractor and charge you what we like. They will feel they are being shafted, and they will sometimes be right.

The only workable compromise is to make them pay, but also give them contractual control over the archaeological field unit, subject to approval of WSI/quality standards/monitoring by curators.

1man1desk

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[Real Job]

Hi P-MP,
To be fair, you are quoting me out of context! The first point you quote I was trying to say that competitive tendering was not necessarily the reason that wages etc got better after PPG16 than they were before, other factors were at play. There is no contradiction between that and saying that present wages are poor because of the free market and cut throat competition between units.

On your further point, of course I agree that free market economics are the dominant paradigm, but not exclusively so. Not all professions are the same - nurses and doctors? Rail engineers (recently re-nationalised in all but name 'cos the free market wasn't working)? Archaeological curators?

Also, if we are going to go into this, some markets are more free than others. Some are heavily regulated by the state (e.g. private nurseries, undertakers) which doesn't necessarily affect wages, but is done for quality purposes), some require accreditation by a professional body (architects, independent financial advisors, etc), some services are only available from local government (building inspectors)etc, etc.

At the moment archaeology is on a par with car repair garages in that it is relatively poorly regulated, but I suggest that is not the best set-up in the long term. But it is simply not the case that all services are abandoned to the same relatively unregulated free-market that archaeology is.

Also, I don't agree with your charecterisation of the archaeology market:

quote:1. high-end professionals who pay higher wages, offer pensions, training and other benefits - and therefore attract better staff who do better jobs and therefore can charge higher fees...

2. ...people who charge as little as possible, pay peanuts, give their staff no training or benefits and do a crap job

Luckily for me I work for a unit that pays well and does good archaeology, but in my experience it is the exception (and its certainly weak in the training and pension areas). The mass of archaeology units pay rubbish, but because they are staffed by dedicated professionals, they produce good archaeology when they are able to. I'm not nit-picking - I think your characterisation suggests that the current free market at least works some of the time i.e when clients are looking for high quality work (because the curator has specified it). Yet it is not the case that there is a connection between high quality work and higher wages and benefits.

Perhaps we need a more regulated market, perhaps accreditation, perhaps getting rid of the market altogether. But I am certain that we should not merely accept the current system.

[Real Job]

Hi 1man,

Sorry, I have got to get back to work so can't give your point the attention it deserves. But I suppose my key question would be do curators have sufficient resources/power at present to solve the problems afflicting archaeology (to say, e.g, 'you can't use that archaeological contractor because they pay their staff too little')? Even given greater power, they will still be battling against the tendency of the market to drive down wages and conditions and quality.

[kevin wooldridge]

quote:Originally posted by 1man1desk For those of us old enough to have been working in the field both before and after the advent of PPG16 and competitive tendering, it is clear that pay, conditions of employment (if any) and the quality of (rescue) archaeological work done were all worse beforehand. There were significant improvements immediately after, and some additional progress when the IFA first brought in their recommended pay minima.

Does 1man1desk have any evidence to back up his claim regarding real improvements in pay since PPG16 came in?

I have looked at the majority of archaeological employers who are currently advertising for archaeological staff and have found that over half are still offering wages for digging and supervisory staff linked to local government grades 1-3. This is irrespective of whether the unit is local government based or not. My memory of the late 80's (ie pre PPG16) is that virtually all archaeological employers were local or central government based and offering exactly the same grades of employment. Sure pay has gone up in that time but only at the rate of local government pay increases and colleagues in local authority trade unions tell me that this has hardly kept pace with inflation let alone increased in real terms.

I will accept that there have been some improvements in the pay and conditions of archaeologists, particularly in the consultancy sector and through the creation of a tier of project managers that hardly existed prior to 1990, but I don't believe these improvements have been uniform across the profession and certainly not at the root and branch data recovery and data processing sections.

Happy to hear otherwise though.....

[archae_logical]

One question you have to ask which I believe is pertinent. What value do you place on archaeology?

From what I percieve as a bystander, archaeologists are forced into the position of getting what they can in the time the developer allows. All I seem to hear is ?we had the machinery breathing down our necks as we rushed to finish this? and similar. Surely our past is worth more than this. [:0]
As I keep saying the past belongs to us all not only archaeologists or developers etc. I know businesses have timescales but this shouldn?t mean the archaeology is pressured. If the business knows, or even suspects, it wants to work on a site which contains archaeology it should make contingency plans as any good business does for these occasions. Aren?t developers supposed to insure themselves against unsuspected archaeology being found?
As for developers feeling shafted as 1 man says, I was appalled to hear how little it costs some developers (I?m sure you all know to whom I refer). ?400,000 sounds a lot of money to lay people but spread it over 10 years and who is being shafted?
We hear fine words about heritage from various bodies but where are the actions to suit? :face-confused:

As for pay and conditions to a certain extent I?d blame everyone involved, both past and present, for the situation in which you find yourselves. There are ways to change it but you all need to work together for it to happen.

E
Getting off her high horse and going back to studying [:p]

[1man1desk]

quote:Hi 1man,

Sorry, I have got to get back to work so can't give your point the attention it deserves. But I suppose my key question would be do curators have sufficient resources/power at present to solve the problems afflicting archaeology (to say, e.g, 'you can't use that archaeological contractor because they pay their staff too little')? Even given greater power, they will still be battling against the tendency of the market to drive down wages and conditions and quality.

(posted by Real Job)

Two questions in one there, I suppose.

Firstly, do curators have sufficient resources/power?
From experience (and from asking them), I think that they do actually have quite a lot of power (or at least influence), although not all of them realise how much they have and it does vary according to the attitude of the planning authority. However, the power they have is to do with the scope and standard of archaeological work to be done. Their powers over who does the work are limited, and they don't have any power over wages/conditions, other than through potential complaints to the IFA about breaches of the Code of Conduct/By-Laws. They can only do that when the contractor is an RAO or an offending individual is a member of the IFA.

One of the big problems that prevents their power from being exersised properly, in my experience (any curators want to comment?), is resources. They don't usually have enough staff/time to monitor properly, and some of the staff don't have sufficient field experience to do the monitoring properly anyway.

Secondly, should they have power over wages/conditions? I think that is out of their remit, to be honest. Their job is to advise the planning authority on what to make developers do, and monitor the work being done to make sure it happens and is done to standard. Wages and conditions of employment are way outside that remit.

1man1desk

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[1man1desk]

quoteoes 1man1desk have any evidence to back up his claim regarding real improvements in pay since PPG16 came in?

(posted by Kevin Wooldridge)

Only anecdotal and personal experience. Beforehand, a high proportion of the workforce were working full-time and earning their living as 'volunteers', but were not on any official payroll, had no employment rights and took home only a bare subsistence payment. This continued in some areas (eg Scotland) longer than in England. Afterwards, people were employed, had rights and had proper wages.

During the early-mid 90s, I (and others that I worked with) noticed a steady increase in the rates being charged for field staff, essentially because they were being paid more.

I'm quite prepared to be persuaded that I am wrong, but that is my experience.

1man1desk

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[1man1desk]

quote:From what I percieve as a bystander, archaeologists are forced into the position of getting what they can in the time the developer allows. All I seem to hear is ?we had the machinery breathing down our necks as we rushed to finish this? and similar. Surely our past is worth more than this.

(posted by archae_logical)

Well, only if they force themselves into that position. The developer usually has to allow sufficient time for the scope of work agreed with the curator. Where it breaks down is if the archaeologists themselves have under-estimated the time required (they often do), and the developer has based a complex and very expensive works programme on the assumption that the archaeologists will be off site when they said they would.

Bear in mind that the cost of delay to a major construction programme is completely out of proportion to the cost of the actual archaeological works. A week's delay can cost tens, or even hundreds, of thousands of pounds.

1man1desk

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