One Minima to Rule them All

[Marc Berger]

No it's an evaluation but what I am trying to get at is that it is ineffect the source of pay minima and a problem for it as well. The ifa has a standard for evaluation the wordings of which they regularly play around with. Currently they have this:

PURPOSE OF FIELD EVALUATION
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The purpose of field evaluation is to gain information about the archaeological resource within a given area or site (including presence or absence, character, extent, date, integrity, state of preservation and quality), in order to make an assessment of its merit in the appropriate context, leading to one or more of the following:
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*​the formulation of a strategy to ensure the recording, *preservation or management of the resource;
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*​the formulation of a strategy to initiate a threat to the archaeological resource
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*​the formulation of a proposal for further archaeological investigation within a programme of research

. And they have dumped a load of algao rubbish in there like programme of research and a bunkum use of the word formulation but from it what I want to ascertain is a pay minima. The pay minima that hosty seems so enamoured of seems to be based around the ifa concept of "corporate" membership and paying a licence based on salary for "excavation" rights which is also something on which the ifa has decided that it's has authority to write standards or codes for rather than membership being by qualification to excavate eg a degree. So for instance is pay minima to be based on presence or absence, character, extent, date.....which basically contribute to formulating a price with the problem for pay minima that price is then competed on with the likely out come of do less with less staff and pay them less if you can.

What's going on here is that we have a system which is started by "self employment" - the evaluation is a looking for "work" which generates a price but which then hands over to a system that the ifa wants as a Rate-everlasting excavation teams ideally working on salarys. My view is that the over riding trend is towards everything is an evaluation and hence the self employed tax structure is the only tax structure suitable for an archaeologist.

Zero hour contracts are just another responce by public servants to maintain a salaried open copyright public ownership approach to archaeology:face-stir:

what I don't understand about zero hour is the access to benefits angle like job seekers. It appears that you sign up to zero hour contracts for specified months at a time but could potentially do very little work over the period. What level of national insurance has to be achieved to get any "benefits" off the state after or during the agreement is over as the safty net of benefits after the contract is over can be the only reason that diggers don't go self employed and claim legitimate expenses against tax.....particularly for the under 35s

https://www.gov.uk/jobseekers-allowance/what-youll-get

https://www.gov.uk/jobseekers-allowance/eligibility