Campaign to keep IfA minimum salaries

[Unitof1]

Cor this must be recent, could be as a result of buget cuts!! I dont remember doing a yearly look at the ifa accounts. I predict a new bajr tradition. We should give it its own thread. Well done Martin for spotting it. How did you know I was interested..

Initial inpression is: subscription income £300k, RP income £57k both of which have gone up proportionaly from 2010 and combined make about £357K which is a bit worrying when the operating costs or so called Adminitration expenses are £424371 and this is down from +£500K the year before

so its very lucky that they have
[SIZE=1][SIZE=1]
[/SIZE][/SIZE]Total project income -£415471

which kinda puts the combined subscriptions in the shade and they are able to generate this project income it appears just through administration expenses.
The project team though have had a bit of an off year as previously they had generated £642194 from "project income". What are these projects or rather wheres this money coming from? and who are they competing against and what kind of conflicts of interest could there possibly be?

After this I get a bit lost, appart from wondering what these lucrative projects are, It seems that they generated £400k using just £40k worth of direct project costs within a total cost of sales bill of £361507 but then this cost of sales which is basically salaries also has over it the Adminitration expensis, a different set of salaries, of £424371 presumably to help generate the total income of £415471.

you could lump all the salary costs together and get over £700K liability on £359k subscriptions

anyway to answer my question a 20% increase in membership subscriptions toget rid of the ROs but you are still going to be about £50k short in paying for the Administartion costs.

[BAJR]

Fascinating breakdown. Thanks for that. Though I realise it is even more complicated - and will include funding for bursaries etc.

Perhaps it is not good to look at a negative collapse of RO scheme... as that also helps no-one. We have to move forward not backwards. this is why we also have to campaign for minima retention. Only a few days left. so please do send that email - share this news. it is simple to do and important.

All it needs is a comment that you - as an archaeologist - want to see the retention of minima with the understanding that this is not a rate, but rather a protection from poorer pay. the Benchmark 2008 report already explains the 16-37% disparity in salary rates.

In relation to the legal challenge.. as Kevin suggests... ask what it is, who is bringing it, or threatening to as this is a challenge to you as an IfA member. remember - the IfA is the membership. So somebody is threatening You with legal action unless they can pay you less. I would be pretty miffed about that.

make sure you are clear and polite ( I know you will ) and this goes to the Council and prospect.

Do not suggest kicking people out, nor demand action, not complain about the "Ifa" - just stick to the issue.

we do NOT want to see the minima removed. we do NOT understand the nature of the legal challenge or the advice the IfA has received

SPREAD the WORD

[archaeologyexile]

While I agree wages, terms and conditions are poor, etc one only needs to look at every other contractor on a building site and compare their equipment etc to the grubby archaeologists scrabbling about in a hole to see that. there is a real risk that we will be come too expensive, and thus risk coming to the attention of the red tape cutters.

curators put too many conditions on nonsense, in Scotland some 70% of evaluations and watching briefs yield negative results and most units prefer a negative site. As soon as they find something budgets are out of the window. This de-skills the team but keeps units going.

Id rather we did fewer sites and did them better, some units will have to go to the wall, but this would reduce the overall cost of archaeology and allow the wages of those that remains to go up.

[kevin wooldridge]

I still feel that the best stick to raise against those on IfA council who will remove the current 'voluntary' salary minima, is the threat of a motion to the AGM from disgruntled members that will enforce salary minima as IfA policy.....David is right that protests need to go in now, but even if this doesn't succeed, the campaign isn't over....hopefully the Diggers Forum will take this up as an issue and campaign for a motion at either an EGM or the next AGM....

[P Prentice]

... the best stick to raise against those on IfA council who will remove the current 'voluntary' salary minima, is ...

as you say but we have heard precious little from those council members who partake of this forum - i for one wonder about the manouvering neccessary to swing this vote even if you can claim a mandate?

i wonder if goes something like this: the uber units employ most of the lowest paid workers but they have the biggest overheads which makes them expensive. if they cant compete on price, then the lowest paid workers will find themselves slaving for the non-regulated companies for even less.

[gwyl]

(@Kevin; Sadie Watson and Chiz Harward who are both on the Diggers' Forum Comittee are and have been fighting this corner. DF are writing as the body representing the people who will bear the brunt of this.)

But this is not an issue that will go away

As living costs increase and various state benefits which have been subventing archaeological wages (and by exension units) are cut by the government the IfA is contributing to the impoverishment of single people, couples and families of those who work in British archaeology.

For too long archaeological units have relied on employees' good will while paying staff wages which keep them above the breadline, but with little move to manoeuvre.

There are many in the same situation as me in their 40s who are still renting and on HB to pay that rent. The housing situation in this country is f@*&ed, but by depressing wages we are not going to climb out f this quagmire. Rather we will sink deeper as fewer younger people wil see this as a career, and certain interested parties will see what they wish come to pass; namely, the almost total deskilling of site-staff, who dig and only dig (because anyone can dig), and an upper caste of site managers who have been to university, and whose skills are largley managerial rather than archaeological.

That is the future i see for British archaeology; and this because we still haven't signed Valletta. Moreover, one can see that the practies which have become inherent here are being noted abroad. How long before the rest of Europe adopts this mad, laissez-faire neo-liberal CMOT approach?

The minima are voluntary - and largely upheld thanks to David, although Chiz Harward's unending scrutinising of JIS ensures that few, if any, pass there - if the situation becomes a free-for-all then the race to the bottom will only lead to the bottom. Simples. That way lies poverty and skills loss, and will only ensure that the quality of work decreases. I refer everyone who quibbles on that point to read Paul Blinkhorn and Chris Cumberpatch's paper from TAG2012. Already, academic environmental archaeologists are a bit sniffy about the quality of commercial enviro work; what's the point of daing any of this if the quality of work becomes so low that the results are of use to neither man nor beast? how are we to improve rather than wash our hands? why bother with any of it if we are determined to destroy while only half doing the job? better off not knowing what we're destroying and our models of the LBA landscape and Roman towns, Anglo-saxon invasiosn could have stayedas they were 40+ years ago.

It's all changed. It's the 21st century. Not the 19th or 1960s or 1980s. We live in a post-PPG16 world which itself has evolved. Time for conditions and pay to also.

[sadie]

I wasn't going to wade in on this one, but as a member of Council it probably does fall to me to clarify some things. There are issues of confidentiality though, and I am not going to betray anybody's confidences or say anything that would result in fewer DF members on Council than there are already!

The issue revolved around those mentioned by David earlier: that some people think the requirement of ROs to adhere to salary minima is on dodgy ground legally, and that the IfA may be leaving themselves open to legal challenges on the basis of price fixing etc. Other professional bodies do set salaries/prices in other ways, it may be that the IfA just has to be more circumspect about how they do it in future. The legal advice has been sought and will be discussed at the Council meeting on 30th (which is in London by the way, so don't bother protesting in Reading!). The Working Party discussed it last week but I am not going into details here.

The letter was signed by many RPHs, from units all over the country, of all sizes. There were a couple of notable, honourable exceptions, and I hope we can tell you who they are sometime soon, as not all employers are bad guys. Most are though, unfortunately. They have jumped on this 'legal problem' bandwagon in the hope of frightening Council into rejecting the whole concept of minima, to force their own political will upon Council. I find it disgraceful, undemocratic and intimidatory. That's what we are up against, and we have said as much in the last DF newletter.

I can't stop myself adding that if we had more DF members or sympathetic ears on Council we may not be in this mess at all- there are a few now, but maybe not enough to ensure the coup we need on 30th. Please feel free to stand next time,or to volunteer for DF duties- Gwyl (full time SPO job, 4 kids to support, Chiz (self-employed,1 kid to support) and myself (full time SPO job, 2 kids to support) could really do with the help quite frankly.

[P Prentice]

thanks sadie
we need to find a way to allow workers to lobby their employers who are exploiting this. will the df find natural allies in the finds and environmental groups etc?

[BAJR]

I do hope that fundamentally all contractors are committed to improving pay within this sector and I realise they have genuine concerns with trying to implement pay increases in what was a troubled environment. They all have a deep experience in business practice and will realise that although the market will not tolerate significant increase in costs ( where salary bills form a large part of the operating budget) they must invest in a future for the sector as a whole, even with the paltry sums talked about in additional costs. I am able to confirm that currently there is a lack of suitable archaeologists able to take current advertised posts.... this is a time to attract people to the sector, rather than produce the spectre of potential legal challenges - which quite frankly is offensive.

Let us hope that those that banded together to call for the minima to be scrapped will not have sway the Council on the 30th.

Here are the names of Council>

Let us tell them that we would support the retention of minima.
Let us tell them that we WILL NOT stand by and watch meekly

• Jan Wills - Hon Chair
  
• Jo Bacon - Hon Secretary
  
• Neil Maylan - Hon Treasurer -
  
• Beverley Ballin Smith - Hon Vice Chair Outreach
  
• Nick Shepherd - Hon Vice Chair Standards
  
• Mark Collard - Hon Vice Chair Membership and Personnel
  
• Steve Allen
  
• Brigitte Buss
  
• Chris Cox
  
• Chiz Harward
  
• Kirsten Holland
  
• Julie Lochrie
  
• Frank Meddens
  
• Geoff Morley
  
• Mike Nevell
  
• Mark Newman
  
• Richard Oram
  
• Jayne Pilkington
  
• Natasha Powers
  
• John Sode-Woodhead
  
• Sadie Watson
  
• Brendon Wilkins
  

[troll]

I have to admit that a goodly few years ago I railed against the assumption on the part of the IfA that they had the right to unilaterally set minima for professional archaeologists that were lower than Council bin-men. From Sadies` post above (many thanks Sadie by the way!), it seems that a number of units are challenging the right of the IfA to set minima that are so "high". This is utterly absurd and also unacceptable.

If these units have made the erroneous and naive assumption to imagine that we are all stupid enough to believe that field archaeology is far too expensive and overheads are uncomfortably high, then we have a bit of a problem. The overwhelmingly larger bite of the apple is taken by consultancies who routinely add thousands (in some cases tens of thousands) to the actual/real cost of archaeological work. So, are these challengers asking that professional archaeologists take a nose-dive into poverty in order to further increase their profit margins? If that is the game they are playing then a couple of things occur to me...

First and foremost, let`s discuss this on the pages of every newspaper we can find who love a good story about businesses who drive working people into poverty in order to increase their profit margins. Also, and this may be a big ask......there is no reason why the workforce shouldn`t pro-actively (and publicly) boycott the challengers as future employers. Existing employees of the challengers should in my view prepare to institute legal proceedings (breach of contract as a minimum) if and when the desired reduction in salaries are rolled out.

Could it be as simple as this? The challengers are no longer accepted as a part of the IfA as they are challenging some of the fundamental concepts of the Institute simply for fiscal advantage, professionals choose not to work for them which will mean an exodus of the highly skilled and experienced to those employers who do adhere to the IfA minima. Could be interesting......Curatorial archaeologists could theoretically at least, be put in a position where they may not continue to view the challengers in a favourable light and the interpretation of IfA regs and guidelines could actually work against them and by default, may in fact become a fiscal handicap. In a nutshell- the challenging businesses could/should be isolated by the workforce and perhaps technically- expelled from the IfA.

Consultants will in my view be the major winners in this (if the challenge is successful) and I suspect that a significant proportion of the input to this challenge comes from those quarters. The Client has for years been misled as to the actual cost of archaeological work by Consultants. Am I seriously expected to believe that the challengers are pursuing this in the interests of their Clients? Or that they believe that they are aiming to enhance the professional standard of work? Or to make themselves more competitive? Can`t really be that competitive if no-one will work for you and you become shunned by the only professional Institute for archaeology in the country.....:face-huh: