21st November 2011, 07:31 PM
Dinosaur Wrote:(a) 15k (listen to the howls....)
(b) 20k
© 25k
(d) 35k
Your starting salary is pretty close to the current BAJR minimum, and your 20+ years salary is just above the BAJR grade 7, suggesting that you think that current levels of pay are basically realistic! However, the BAJR grades reflect different roles, rather than simply length of experience, with ?15,700 being the recommended rate for a 'basic site assistant', and ?33,800+ for 'senior management and directors'. Are people (not just Dinosaur) suggesting that a 'basic site assistant' with 20 years experience should be paid ?35k or ?42k or whatever, even though they may have no more responsibility on the site than someone with less than 5 years?
I know that a few old lags on a site can do the work of several dozen recent graduates (I exagerate, of course), but it seems to me that if people want to earn more money, they may have to accept more responsibility by acting as a supervisor or project officer or project manager. I'm aware that some people on here would regard that as equivalent to selling their soul to satan, but it's surely the case that if all you want to do is dig, you're probably going to have to accept digger's rates. Yes, a digger with 20 years experience should be paid more than a recent graduate, to reflect their greater skill and knowledge, but realistically the differential between the two can never be a great as having two people working side-by-side and doing essentially the same job where one is earning more than twice as much as the other. If that were the case, diggers with 20+ years would never be employed, because you could get two people for the same money.
If the question is what should be the pay-scale for a 'basic site assistant', over 20 years, I'd say a starting salary of around ?18,000 for a recent graduate, and around ?25,000 for someone with 20 years experience (obviously linked to inflation, so that someone starting out now would be earning more than ?25,000 if they were still digging in 20 years time). If the person with 20 years experience is also running the site, dealing with the developer, consultant and council, organising the plant and portaloos, checking the archive, commissioning the post-ex and writing the report, then obviously they'd be paid more, but assuming that both are doing the same job, I don't see that a huge differential would be practical.
I now sit back and wait the inevitable condemnation!
You know Marcus. He once got lost in his own museum