'What has IFA ever done for us...?'

[Jack]

...........I now think the way to control archaeology (standards and ethics), to improve terms and conditions of employment and to put a brake on the number of professional practitioners of archaeology is to franchise a limited number of archaeological undertakings. These undertakings will work within a fixed price set-up for the type of work they offer, will offer a national fixed scale of payments for archaeological work (be it wages or fess) and will work either within a fixed geographic area or to a specific archaeological specialism or specialisms.......

Hmm, isn't that illegal? Price fixing and all that? Not sur I understand you here.

'Limited number of undertakings?' If mitigation of the impact of construction to the archaeological record isn't built into the planning regs lots of 'unknown' archaeological remains will be destroyed.

'Fixed price set up?' How can you fix the price of the unknown in a competative market?
xx(

[kevin wooldridge]

My main objection to chartered status for the IFA would be removed if the IFA were to accompany such plans with root and branch reform of the terms and conditions of archaeological employment, a staged plan to significantly improve salaries and a vision of how to effectively regulate what is pretty much at present an unregulated market.

The 'franchising of archaeology' idea was not mine. It was one of the recommendations of the All Party Parliamentary Archaeology Grooup a few years back. Price fixing may be illegal if it involves collusion between 'competitors'; that however is not the same as a set fee for a product or service. Franchisees (McDonalds, KFC, Quik-Fit Fitters spring to mind) can have set rates for goods and services that apply nationally.....I will admit to being 'anti-competititon' as regards archaeology. I would prefer it if archaeologists co-operated rather than competed....I would like to see closer links between field and academic archaeology and would be happy to see an arrangement where all franchisees had to provide evidence of a close and effective link to an academic body (university, museum, or learned society...)

[GnomeKing]

excellent thoughts Kevin

[trowelfodder]

Nice one Kevin - its fantastic to see such a reasonable well thought out reply to an emotive issue.

Sometimes its all too easy to get bogged down with strong feelings and create a circular argument:face-approve:

[Comarch]

My main objection to chartered status for the IFA would be removed if the IFA were to accompany such plans with root and branch reform of the terms and conditions of archaeological employment, a staged plan to significantly improve salaries and a vision of how to effectively regulate what is pretty much at present an unregulated market.

The 'franchising of archaeology' idea was not mine. It was one of the recommendations of the All Party Parliamentary Archaeology Grooup a few years back. Price fixing may be illegal if it involves collusion between 'competitors'; that however is not the same as a set fee for a product or service. Franchisees (McDonalds, KFC, Quik-Fit Fitters spring to mind) can have set rates for goods and services that apply nationally.....I will admit to being 'anti-competititon' as regards archaeology. I would prefer it if archaeologists co-operated rather than competed....I would like to see closer links between field and academic archaeology and would be happy to see an arrangement where all franchisees had to provide evidence of a close and effective link to an academic body (university, museum, or learned society...)

First of all we must admit to ourselves that Archaeology, as a job, is still not a profession. It will never be a profession until it has the basic structure of one. Training and recognized qualifications are the basis of any profession. CPD then adds to the skills and knowledge of the people working in the profession that is seen by peers as a standard across the board. Archaeology has come out of an academic and amateur background and is still carrying this past. The IfA looks to see how standards are being maintained by units but workers are left to the whims of managers and of course they are unwilling (mostly) to invest in a transient workforce, here to day gone tomorrow. Diggers know this and thus see no relevance to them as so called professionals. This is the market, which you support or not. I am old enough to remember units based with county councils and they were a heritage service. Kevin and I, I believe, would like to see something similar return, in an ideal world. Job structure and status guaranteed, as much as it ever can be. As it is we need to speak of how we can make archaeology a profession and the rest will follow. I must state that I have never had a days training in 20 years, despite asking until I gave up. Personally I would like to see the IfA tax all units by means test and run training themselves and then diggers would see the relevance of an institute for all archaeologists of all skill levels.
Anyone going to mention the public in all this? After all your digging what is it for? Again, as a freelance community archaeologist I would love to have training and be monitored by the IfA to make sure I am doing a good job. That is why it is the Institute for Archaeologists and the Field was taken out, I hope.

[kevin wooldridge]

Comarch - I don't think we are a million miles apart.....

Back in the late 80s/early 90s I was one of the IfA 'resisiters' who tried to stop the IfA (in collusion with EH and SCUM) from effectively destroying the old county, town and city unit system. We organised a couple of conferences to discuss the matter rang around all of our friends and former friends, tried to interest the media, ran a fringe session at an IFA conference I remember....all to no avail. I don't claim to be gifted with second sight, but I and many of my colleagues at the time could see where the disintegration of the then existing system (with all of its admitted imperfections) was leading and - lo and behold - thats exactly where we have reached. However as the old Don Mclean song says 'They weren't listening then, they aren't listening now'.

Did it do my career any good? Not really. The editor of a well known (but little read!!) archaeology magazine described us as pursuing a blatantly 'Marxist fringe agenda'....an English Heritage inspector at the time (now a respected academic) told me after one session I chaired - 'Competitive Tendering and Project Funding - its the same thing as far as we (EH) are concerned'....Right!! I also recall at an IfA AGM in Birmingham telling the then Chair of the IfA that if he allowed this farce to be enacted we might as well all leave the IfA and instead join the Institute of Loss Adjusters!! That comment certainly didn't do my career any good and I never did get offered that job in Borsetshire!!

I'd be happy you might guess (even after all these years) to see some semblance of sanity return to the regulation of the business of archaeology....

[Dinosaur]

Even under the old 'County Unit' system there was still a requirement for 'floating' diggers, possibly even more so than now (since there was less scope for units to move people around geographically), indeed that was what many would regard as the heyday of the 'circuit digger'. Hence it would in no way help to create a 'career structure' for diggers, they'd still be forever moving on to whichever county happened to have a lot of fieldwork on at that moment having just been laid off from one with none. Seem to recall that council pay rates and which grades were being used seem to vary rather a lot too, several council units I worked for paid diggers armed with degrees rather less than the cleaners (no disrespect to cleaners, fine, hard-working body of people in my experience). If you put the funding of archaeology back under government control at any level, whether local, regional or central, it would probably be a disaster on the wages front!

[kevin wooldridge]

If you put the funding of archaeology back under government control at any level, whether local, regional or central, it would probably be a disaster on the wages front!

On the day that English Heritage are advertising Project Archaeologist jobs on BAJR at pay rates far in excess of the 'average' for commercial archaeological undertakings that clearly isn't true!!

Of course one of the major differences in the pre-'free-for-all' days of archaeology was that many county and urban units were core funded, sometimes by the local authority and sometimes by EH or its predecessors. In London where we had only a limited number of core funded posts and pretty much relied on developer funding from the late 70s though to 1991 we were able to provide continuity of employment for in excess of 100 archaeologists over the whole of that period. True, when the numbers reached 300-400 circa 1990 there was going to be a massive implosion, but I remember attending meetings with Museum of London management years before that disaster where we warned them of the dangers of unbridled expansion. In fact it was the Trade Unions documentation of such meetings over an extended period of time that enabled the dismissed staff of MoL to win their industrial tribunal case in 1991 after the managements claim that the collapse of the whole shebang in September 1990 was 'an unpredictable event' was dismissed by the tribunal.

Local authority pay rates were a disaster true. This was largely due to the initial employment of 'County Archaeologists' circa 1974. A lot of these posts (with no earlier precedent) were graded at LA grade 4 which subsequently meant that everyone in the unit had to be paid less than the boss (ie grade 1 or 2 or 3). But one advantage under the local authority system - if you moved authority you took your accrued benefits with you. Hence you might work for 5 different counties in 5 yeasr, but at the end of the day you would have the same standing as if you been in continuous employment. That doesn't happen within the current system. Indeed I have even heard of one unit having differential redundancy policies for staff based in different locations. That couldn't happen under a local authority employment.

I agree that what creates career structures is continuity of employment. And that is possible under either system. What I am not so sure about is whether the numbers of people wishing to work in a carreer in archaeology can be sustained by any system. I don't want to apear Malthusian about it , but the bare fact is that if there were only 200 professional archaeologists in the UK, they would all be earning a reasonable salary!! The fact that the IfA estimate there to be closer to 7000 aspirant archaeologists suggests to me where one of the problems lies. My suggestion to franchise a limited number of archaeological contractors is to my mind the only way that employment numbers can be made to fit employment opportunities. Anyone who experienced 1st or 2nd hand the problems of the MoL in 1990 will know the pain that an implosion of archaeological employment causes. You would imagine that such lessons need learning only once in a career, but here we were in 2007-2009 repeating the same mistakes all over again. Economic theorists would suggest that in unsustainable systems such events occur with a greater rapidity and with greater frequency until either the whole system collapses or there is regulatory intervention. As we are so bad under unbridled competition in heeding our errors of even the most recent past, I think I would prefer to see us as a profession biting the bullet of regulation.

That of course is just my opinion.....

[Unitof1]

[SIZE=3]Originally Posted by Dinosaur
If you put the funding of archaeology back under government control at any level, whether local, regional or central, it would probably be a disaster on the wages front!

[/SIZE]

[SIZE=3]On the day that English Heritage are advertising Project Archaeologist jobs on BAJR at pay rates far in excess of the 'average' for commercial archaeological undertakings that clearly isn't true!!

[/SIZE]
Oh yes it is

[troll]

Agree wholeheartedly with Kevin on a number of fronts. Competitive tendering in archaeology is counter-productive and is simply a Trojan horse through which central government can shrug off all responsibility for a finite national asset. Archaeology as an industry/profession has operated in an unregulated and un-policed free-for all environment since at least the early 1990s. Regulation is the obvious solution and in terms of the potential role of the IFA in all this......continue to produce, issue and promote standards whilst a government body pro-actively polices both the IFA and RAOs. Jobs a goodie.Chartered status achievable, cowboys excluded, we evolve to become the profession the tax-payer deserves.