18th November 2005, 01:45 PM
Quote:quote:It ought to be at least a given surely that RAOs pay the 'average' archaeological wage
Maybe so, and I would like to see RAOs paying more. But you can't specify an average; as soon as you say that RAOs have to pay the industry average, some of them would have to increase their wages - so the average would go up - so they would have to increase again - and so on ad infinitum. The maths doesn't work!
If you just specify what the industry average should be, how do you enforce that against an individual company? An average must mean that roughly the same number of people are paid less than the figure as are paid more. Any individual company could pay as low as it likes.
All that you can actually specify is the minimum that is acceptable. That does not mean that you recommend that those are the wage levels actually applied - just that you are open to disciplinary action if you pay less.
I am not familiar with the details, but as I understand it the IFA did not arrive at their minima out of the blue. I believe that they are related to Local Government pay scales, because that relates to the biggest single block of archaeological employers. I think the reasoning was that if the minima were higher, no local authority employers could join, because they are not able to pay above the scale. However, linking them to those levels does exclude organisations (there used to be quite a few, don't know about now) who paid less than the local government scales.
We could debate whether it is really appropriate for that local government link to be maintained, and I am not 100% sure whether it still is. Certainly the majority of local authority units are now self-financing, profit-making organisations, not a public service.
1man1desk
to let, fully furnished