Dinosaur Wrote:have been offered jobs/promotions direct,
Yep, that is just it though they get promotions. They move up in pay. The average working life of a digger is 5 years (being very very generous most don't last more than a year or 2, with the exception of that one who has been doing it for 25 years). People are going to be moving up all the time so the lower ranks are a revolving door of jobs.
While your company may not post ads, others do and you all are connected. Everyone has to bid for jobs. What are the costs accounted for in bids? 3 things- staff costs, overhead costs, and profit margin. To stay in business these costs have to line up fairly well with your competition. Yes, you can increase your profit margin by cutting your overhead or staff costs BUT you cut your staff costs too much and your staff sees that company so and so are paying x amount, they leave to get that job. While companies post jobs it is individuals that take them. This survey is about individuals and what they get paid not what company x pays.
Yes, the system is not perfect, lots of people stay with a job for other reasons than money or leave a job for other reasons than money. Small one man firms work out of their house to keep their overhead down. Yet, those one man shop can't take on big projects so they lose out on the more lucrative contracts. Basically, you are dealing with a constrained system in which pay can go only so high or so low. Your top is constrained by a competitive bidding process and your bottom is controlled by both the IfA and BAJR.
Yes, some people try to cheat the system and screw their employees. I am sure it happens all the time and there is not much the IfA will do about it and BAJR won't post their jobs (the IfA will post them, so this survey captures those low ball pay offerings). However, someone just has to look at this survey or job postings to see they are getting screwed and leave the job. Its why I posting all of this, not because I love spending hours of my life looking at job postings but so people can have an idea if they are getting screwed or not.
Dinosaur Wrote:Do you have any data for how many companies you don't have data for? And what proportion of the profession this represents? Isn't your survey merely representative of employers who for whatever reason are unable to hold onto staff?
That's why I point to the profiling the profession report to show that this data lines up with it. Second dataset collected from a different source lines up with my data source.
I CAN NOT STRESS THIS ENOUGH- this data covers a wide range of sources. Some employers will be better than others when it comes to pay, congrats if you work for them. Some will be worse for pay, might be time to consider a change. This is stats not personal experience based research. In other words my favorite quote "Maybe it's not everyone else that has a problem, Maybe it's you".
If anyone thinks that the numbers are wrong based on personal experience please do share so that we may know which people to avoid working for or who to get a job with BUT I think we will find that pay falls pretty much within the distribution seen in the data. No one is making 25k as an excavator or 8K (converted to hourly pay, not actually pay. If you only work 2 months you are probably making 2k a year).