pay pay pay

[P Prentice]

it seems to me to be an appropriate juncture to question why pay rates are so abysmally low. it surely has nothing to do with a developers ability to pay up, or management exploitation - despite much forum rhetoric. rates have been maintained at sub-standard levels because local authority units and national agencies can not employ staff outside strict banding guidelines which require parity with other poorly paid front line staff. is it time for these dinosaurs to go to the wall so the rest of us can benefit?

[differentcolourmud]

speaking as one of these dinosaurs, if the private units would just match council rates we'd all stop moaning.

[Wax]

How many local authority units are there left now? Local Government Archaeology Services perhaps and there the wages are actually not that bad (if you are lucky enough to be employed as they are rapidly going to the wall). Get rid of the Local Government curators/ planning archaeologists and you run the risk of developments taking place without archaeological mitigation. So who wins? I do not think different sectors in archaeology should be blaming each other for crap wages. What we do is not valued and too many people are willing to do it for bugger all wages, Catch 22.

[kevin wooldridge]

My personal interpretation is to side with P Prentice on this one.

When local government was reorganised in 1974 and the first county archaeologists were employed, many of these positions were set at local government grade 4 for lack of any comparative equivalent positions. Needless to say when the singular county archaeologist expanded into county units, everyone had to be paid less than the county archaeologist so diggers were normally on LG grade 1 or 2. At the Museum of London a local government regrading exercise in the early 1980s recommended that diggers should be on LG grade 4, supervisors on LG grade 5 and managers on LG grade 6 and above. If that exercise had been paralleled across UK archaeology the average pay of a digger with 5 years experience would now be closer to ?30,000 pa rather than ?20,000 pa. So its part historical and part reluctance. The IfA were shadowing local government pay grades for many years with their recommended minima, but they chose to set the digger pay at LG2 rather than LG4.....

[Wax]

The IfA were shadowing local government pay grades for many years with their recommended minima, but they chose to set the digger pay at LG2 rather than LG4.....

So are you implying that actually the low pay rates were set by the IFA because they chose to model them on the lower local Government rates when they could have set than at a much higher rate? :face-crying:

[monty]

If that exercise had been paralleled across UK archaeology the average pay of a digger with 5 years experience would now be closer to ?30,000 pa rather than ?20,000 pa..

?20,000 pa for diggers with five years experience ?? where is this.......... I want that job !:face-approve:

[Noddy]

I have to say I agree too. During the really good years 2004-2007/8 when site staff were in short supply and the best ones being poached by Irish units, market forces should have driven up wages. However IfA (and to a lesser extent BAJR) tracked local governement rises which, iirc, were typically about 2-3%, which was pretty poor at the time. The problem was that at the same time a lot of local government units had their staff regraded as part of Single Status reviews and I know that Albion and ASWYAS staff were all regraded up by a least one pay band. So those council units were at a disadvantage!

However the IfA (and BAJR before it) has ended the link with local government pay scales so it's going to be tough luck for those council units which can't afford to pay their staff at acceptable levels in future... They wont be able to maintain/gain RO status.

[Martin Locock]

I think the limited increases observed in the boom years is telling, because it seemed to show that employers would only pay as little as they could, even when paying more would have led to better retention and the money was there. I'm not sure that this really has anything to do with LAs: there are enough wholly-ccmmercial units who are free to pay whatever they feel the job is worth. I suspect the fundamental issue is that there is an oversupply of labour in a business where staff costs are the main element of a project, leading to depressed wages because all diggers are assumed to be interchangable. It doesn't have to be this way - any project manager with a free hand would pay their good diggers double rather than have useless ones there to make up the numbers, and get more work done better. The trouble is that demand for staff inevitably varies from time to time, making a permanent team difficult to sustain. I think the "skills passport" approach to validating the good diggers is the best way to inform a labour market where expertise is recionised and rewarded.

[Dinosaur]

I know my management would rather pay us better, but if they do we'll just start getting even more under-cut on tenders than we are now and go bust. In the meantime underpaid jobs are better than no jobs?

The main problem is the outfits who put in farcically low tenders (often so low that it is inconceivable that they can actually do adequately the work they're tendering for) - a few years back a local-government operation won a small job (3 or 4 people trial trenching a carpark for a few days) with a tender which wouldn't even have hired a JCB for a day, and was about 1/10 of the other 2 tenders....errr....mysteriously nothing archaeological was found, apparently....only good thing was that they backfilled so incompetently that the carpark surface collapsed and they were forced to return and re-do it their own expense }

Where there are 3 or 4 tenders for a job, curators should be able to query/object to any that are significantly lower than the rest? :face-thinks:

[kevin wooldridge]

So are you implying that actually the low pay rates were set by the IFA because they chose to model them on the lower local Government rates when they could have set than at a much higher rate? :face-crying:

No I am not implying it. It was fact. IfA recommended minima were
tied to local government grades as were the increases, For many years the increase in local government pay equalled the increase in the IfA rates....