IFA Conference

[1man1desk]

Series of quotes from Real Job:

quote:unlike many other professions, archaeology is made up of several disparate groups with different interests

I work with civil engineers on a daily basis, and I can assure you they are a more disparate group than archaeologists. They tend to see us as a very narrow specialist group.

quote:conference will be dominated by consultants, academics and people from the 'business' side of field archaeology and we can hardly expect them to have the best interests of field staff at heart.

Every time I have been to the conference (not for several years, admittedly) it has been dominated by people from field units, plus a strong EH contingent. There used to be a lot of soul-searching about how hard it was to get academics and curators to take an interest in either the IFA or its conference.

quote:The IFA needs to make itself truly representative of the profession. Which means (in addition to its current work):
-Higher pay minimums
-Lower joining fees for field staff
-Lower conference fee for field staff
-And, if its serious about becoming more representative, some sort of outreach scheme enabling non-memebers to come to the conference cheaply..

If you have been paying attention, you will find that the IFA has taken action on the first three of these points within the last few months (if you substitute 'low paid' for 'field'). On the last point, I think the IFA should make itself more representative by attracting more people to join, not by subsidising non-members out of the subscriptions paid by members.

quote:The comparison is usually made with architects and civil engineers and the like - correct me if I'm wrong, but the professional intitutes associasted with those professions do not have to deal with the problem of a large sector of the workforce that is on appalingly low wages. That s the difference.

Civil engineers have recently taken big steps forward, but used to be a low-paid profession in the main. The change has been due to market forces, nothing to do with action by their various professional bodies, which are more management-dominated than the IFA. I should know - a director of my company is a recent President of the Institute of Civil Engineers.
Architects are relatively well-paid (several in my family) once qualified, but have to do 6/7 years training, including work experience that is hard to get and is very low paid. Once qualified, their typical early-career workload includes overseeing contractors as well as design work. So, by the time they are fully qualified, you should probably compare them to an archaeologist with 2 degrees and working as a supervisor or project manager - not with a new graduate archaeologist with, typically, 6 weeks site experience.

quote:And if they did, don't you think they might make it a priority to do something about that situation and seek to represent the interests of that section of the workforce? They certainly wouldn't sit back contentedly with the status quo and then expect their low paid colleagues to rush excitedly to their door as the IFA seems to do.

As mentioned above, the engineers' and architects' professional institutions are much less representative of their grass-roots than the IFA is. People mainly join these institutions because it is an absolute requirement if you want to work in the relevant professions, not just to join but to progress from grade to grade (which is much harder and more expensive for the individual than it is in the IFA).

quote:The IFA according to its own charter should represent the interests of all archaeologists: why doesn't it?

It tries hard to do so - but some of you won't let it.

1man1desk

to let, fully furnished