pay pay pay

[P Prentice]

I know my management would rather pay us better, but if they do we'll just start getting even more under-cut on tenders than we are now and go bust. In the meantime underpaid jobs are better than no jobs?

that's what they all say - funny that

[Dinosaur]

Do they? New one on me

[Digger]

Kevin, I am aware of a Council unit that has needed financial assistance in the past to stay opperational.
I am also aware of a unit that removed the degree requirement for diggers to be more inclusive. Diggers suspected this was to avoid any substantial pay rise during a Council pay review as the job spec could have easily been worded to as 'degree or equivelant experience' and still been inclusive. :face-thinks:

By the way, not accusing anyone of naughty behaviour.

[kevin wooldridge]

Kevin, I am aware of a Council unit that has needed financial assistance in the past to stay opperational. I am also aware of a unit that removed the degree requirement for diggers to be more inclusive. Diggers suspected this was to avoid any substantial pay rise during a Council pay review as the job spec could have easily been worded to as 'degree or equivelant experience' and still been inclusive. :face-thinks:

Hei Digger. I am not doubting that some local authority archaeology units require financial assistance. I am however stating the legal situation - that a local authority (and by definition its services) cannot legally make a loss. Whether that involves some nifty accounting or whether the authority commits to paying core salaries admin and building overheads is another matter. Quite often there is routine charging made by local authority departments to each other that is purely 'internal accounting procedures' and not necessarily evidence of a lack of funding or a loss on the service. And of course sometimes local authority units are required to charge an overhead on its commercial operations to underwrite or supplement a local authorities funding element. And then there are section 106 planning agreements which can also effectively cover local authority inhouse archaeology teams but not necessarily external contractors...

I would dispute that any current field operation of a local authority undertaking makes a loss - most short-contract staff engaged by local authorities need to have the money committed to honour those contracts - I think however the 'overhead' portion of some field work funding, that pays for the infrastructure of the organisation and perhaps core salaries, may on occasion be deficient (and perhaps as Dinosaur suggests) the element of tendering that could appear to give a LA unit a cost advantage. Sadly in such cases it is normally the staff at the bottom end of the food chain that tend to suffer when things go wrong

Never heard of the example of removing a stated qualification, but can see the logic of it, if as you suggest it doesn't fit the profile of the organisation. Not quite sure how that would have an impact on a pay review, because to my knowledge there is no requirement under local government legislation for salary grade minima to be based on academic qualification. I mean you can pay a PhD qualified environmental health officer (or a similarly qualified archaeologist) the same as a refuse collector if you can get away with it.... It sounds to me as if someone in that instance invented a conspiracy theory that in practice was based on an unsubstantiated foundation ....

[Carrickavoy]

When local government was reorganised in 1974 and the first county archaeologists were employed, many of these positions were set at local government grade 4 for lack of any comparative equivalent positions. Needless to say when the singular county archaeologist expanded into county units, everyone had to be paid less than the county archaeologist so diggers were normally on LG grade 1 or 2. At the Museum of London a local government regrading exercise in the early 1980s recommended that diggers should be on LG grade 4, supervisors on LG grade 5 and managers on LG grade 6 and above. If that exercise had been paralleled across UK archaeology the average pay of a digger with 5 years experience would now be closer to ?30,000 pa rather than ?20,000 pa. So its part historical and part reluctance. The IfA were shadowing local government pay grades for many years with their recommended minima, but they chose to set the digger pay at LG2 rather than LG4.....

This explains something. I've been looking for work in the UK. My interest/experience is more towards desk-top historic environment positions, and I'm keen to get experience in the public sector/larger institutions. But I noticed that jobs which had archaeology in the title were usually much more poorly paid then ones that had say heritage or historic environment even though the job descriptions, qualifications etc. were very similar...

[Dinosaur]

Worked for a county council back in the '90s where the archaeology unit was specifically exempted from taking qualifications into account for pay-grading - even the cleaners (no disrespect!) were getting extra wedge if they had a A-levels/degree - presumably they'd spotted that the shovel-contingent were a bit over-qualified and were going to be expensive?

[Digger]

Kevin, I believe that if the job description states that a university degree was required (or equivalent experience etc.) it would increase the renumeration to reflect that. Remove the degree, drop the pay rate. The opposite was done with another job description where the length of experience required for the job was increased. This was so the senior post holders recieved a higher regrading as they were not happy with what they had recieved.

I just think it would be difficult to rely on basing basic archaeological pay levels on Council pay rates, especially if there is a fear that any substantial pay increase for field archaeologists will make the unit unviable and they are therefore kept low.

[Jack]

I agree with Dino............saw first hand a tender from us that we couldn't get any lower (bearing in mind the need for a site cabin, travel expenses etc.) stolen by a certain local unit that was in partnership with the client (a district council) in doing a yearly 'community' research dig/ university training dig in the same area. Guess you can do a commercial dig really cheap if students pay you to do the work!

This is all supposition though as when we queried why we didn't get the job the answer was (as always) our tender was too high...........!

[monty]

I agree with Dino............saw first hand a tender from us that we couldn't get any lower (bearing in mind the need for a site cabin, travel expenses etc.) stolen by a certain local unit that was in partnership with the client (a district council) in doing a yearly 'community' research dig/ university training dig in the same area. Guess you can do a commercial dig really cheap if students pay you to do the work!

This is all supposition though as when we queried why we didn't get the job the answer was (as always) our tender was too high...........!

Common practice and nowt new.....even if you undercut those units who are hand in glove with the curators ..............you will not win the tender............................

[kevin wooldridge]

A couple of pages back a few folk seemed to be agreeing with the idea that one of the restraints on wage levels was that there were too many 'archaeologists'. Would anyone dare to agree that there may also be too many archaeological businesses out there as well?

It seems to me that when we start criticising those who dare to undercut the 'undercutters' then we are in a very sorry state of affairs. Surely no-one really believes that winning work at any price is conducive to creating a career structure. Further it surely breaks one of the main tenets of archaeological ethics in clearly being a less than satisfactory manner in which to undertake archaeological research and conservation (be that in situ or by record). So what is the bottom line? The lowest that anyone is willing to sink to maintain their job/business whatever!!