22nd November 2011, 06:50 PM
Marcus Brody Wrote:...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!
Scarily I think we're both reading from the same hymn-sheet for once, experience at the 'bottom end' of this profession is never likely to be recognised
- I'm a cheat cos I have an over-inflated job title/salary to keep me/my knowledge and experience on board, in exchange for which I'm prepared to knock out a few reports etc occasionally, suspect if you distilled-down what I do to a job description it certainly wouldn't be SPO (which is what I'm paid as), more like aging digger with enough wierd injuries and infirmities to fill a specialist medical tome, who's also dead jammy at finding stuff (which in itself has probably added enough value to enough contracts to pay for all my wages ever), semi-literate and sad enough to like reading site-reports. The job I'm on at the moment is being run from the office by someone with an identical job title/salary, but I do stuff with a shovel and he does stuff with a computer - at least one firm has spotted that a good site operative is as important as an office operative :face-approve: