'What has IFA ever done for us...?'

[kevin wooldridge]

If you put the funding of archaeology back under government control at any level, whether local, regional or central, it would probably be a disaster on the wages front!

On the day that English Heritage are advertising Project Archaeologist jobs on BAJR at pay rates far in excess of the 'average' for commercial archaeological undertakings that clearly isn't true!!

Of course one of the major differences in the pre-'free-for-all' days of archaeology was that many county and urban units were core funded, sometimes by the local authority and sometimes by EH or its predecessors. In London where we had only a limited number of core funded posts and pretty much relied on developer funding from the late 70s though to 1991 we were able to provide continuity of employment for in excess of 100 archaeologists over the whole of that period. True, when the numbers reached 300-400 circa 1990 there was going to be a massive implosion, but I remember attending meetings with Museum of London management years before that disaster where we warned them of the dangers of unbridled expansion. In fact it was the Trade Unions documentation of such meetings over an extended period of time that enabled the dismissed staff of MoL to win their industrial tribunal case in 1991 after the managements claim that the collapse of the whole shebang in September 1990 was 'an unpredictable event' was dismissed by the tribunal.

Local authority pay rates were a disaster true. This was largely due to the initial employment of 'County Archaeologists' circa 1974. A lot of these posts (with no earlier precedent) were graded at LA grade 4 which subsequently meant that everyone in the unit had to be paid less than the boss (ie grade 1 or 2 or 3). But one advantage under the local authority system - if you moved authority you took your accrued benefits with you. Hence you might work for 5 different counties in 5 yeasr, but at the end of the day you would have the same standing as if you been in continuous employment. That doesn't happen within the current system. Indeed I have even heard of one unit having differential redundancy policies for staff based in different locations. That couldn't happen under a local authority employment.

I agree that what creates career structures is continuity of employment. And that is possible under either system. What I am not so sure about is whether the numbers of people wishing to work in a carreer in archaeology can be sustained by any system. I don't want to apear Malthusian about it , but the bare fact is that if there were only 200 professional archaeologists in the UK, they would all be earning a reasonable salary!! The fact that the IfA estimate there to be closer to 7000 aspirant archaeologists suggests to me where one of the problems lies. My suggestion to franchise a limited number of archaeological contractors is to my mind the only way that employment numbers can be made to fit employment opportunities. Anyone who experienced 1st or 2nd hand the problems of the MoL in 1990 will know the pain that an implosion of archaeological employment causes. You would imagine that such lessons need learning only once in a career, but here we were in 2007-2009 repeating the same mistakes all over again. Economic theorists would suggest that in unsustainable systems such events occur with a greater rapidity and with greater frequency until either the whole system collapses or there is regulatory intervention. As we are so bad under unbridled competition in heeding our errors of even the most recent past, I think I would prefer to see us as a profession biting the bullet of regulation.

That of course is just my opinion.....