kevin wooldridge Wrote:I wonder Doug if your survey would be more 'useful' to archaeologists in general if instead of classifying the jobs by title you classified it by salary band. So for example ?12-15000, ?15001-18000, ?18001-21000 etc etc.
I suspect this would show that job titles in UK archaeology are largely irrelevant, unless it can be demonstrated that one job title falls wholly within a limited salary band...it might however serve to demonstrate that there is regional variation in pay rates.
It is not based on job titles at all. The titles used- excavator, supervisor, project officer, etc. are just for clarification so people have a vague idea of what the position is about. For example excavator, when I say excavator everyone knows what I am talking about even though some people call it digger, site assistant, archaeologists, etc.
The positions are based on the description of the job done (its why all the posts link to a methodology page). So excavator jobs are your entry level positions that record sites, supervisors are those in charge of a crew of diggers, project officers are your middle management who basically are in charge of the projects, project managers are your senior positions who technically are in charge of multiple projects or the whole office. (mind you with very small organizations the project manager could also be the excavator as well, there is some difference in levels between employers)
Putting work into bands I think would make the problem even worse. It means you could be doing project officer level work on the pay of an excavator. Which by the way does occur, one company is paying someone excavator wages to do all of their deskbased assessments. That person should be paid way more than the bottom level wages. You have some people in charge of 5 heritage sites getting paid 21,000 while others are getting 30k-40k for the same work.
It is why I include a distribution, to highlight the range and the fact that some people are getting screwed.