2nd December 2009, 09:51 AM
Hello Davidh, welcome, and great to see someone so well informed about the construction industry posting here.
You are quite right that it shouldn't be acceptable to support the status quo. There is a line of argument from management which runs something like, 'well, you're lucky to have a job in this industry anyway, it was all so much worse in my day, the developers won't pay more for us anyway'.
My manager recently said ' I can't believe we get paid for what we do'. I told her that I hope you don't say things like that in front of the clients.
Also, there is an arm on archaeology which is geared towards commercial activity; there are several very large units with turnovers of several million pounds. There are archaeologists in consultancy in most of the major civil engineering companies. There are more commercial archaeologists (or there were until recently) now than at any point in the past. However, cowboy units still don't have any trouble getting people to go self employed on ?67 a day.
This is what the construction union has negotiated as its pay rates. http://www.ucatt.info/content/view/514/32/2009/12/
@Blackish Loam; it's not a bed of roses being a specialist either. My mob pay the field archaeologists more for the same level of responsibility, based on the entirely true notion that I don't supervise junior staff.
You are quite right that it shouldn't be acceptable to support the status quo. There is a line of argument from management which runs something like, 'well, you're lucky to have a job in this industry anyway, it was all so much worse in my day, the developers won't pay more for us anyway'.
My manager recently said ' I can't believe we get paid for what we do'. I told her that I hope you don't say things like that in front of the clients.
Also, there is an arm on archaeology which is geared towards commercial activity; there are several very large units with turnovers of several million pounds. There are archaeologists in consultancy in most of the major civil engineering companies. There are more commercial archaeologists (or there were until recently) now than at any point in the past. However, cowboy units still don't have any trouble getting people to go self employed on ?67 a day.
This is what the construction union has negotiated as its pay rates. http://www.ucatt.info/content/view/514/32/2009/12/
@Blackish Loam; it's not a bed of roses being a specialist either. My mob pay the field archaeologists more for the same level of responsibility, based on the entirely true notion that I don't supervise junior staff.