Opening up the market - keeping the safety net

[Kel]

I've worked for an organisation with no pay structure. It created a toxic atmosphere, where people doing the same job in the same department were paid vastly different wages. With no pay bands, you could find people managing staff who earned more than them. It caused such morale problems that eventually, discussing your wages with another employee was made a disciplinary offence.

I wouldn't recommend it as a sensible way forward. Given the opportunity of paying as many staff as possible as little as possible, in a job market where the supply of experienced staff outstrips the number of jobs available and in a poor economic climate, few employers would do otherwise.

but the potential is there that the better the rate, the better the response and the applicant?

I salute your faith in human nature. Sadly this isn't what I've observed in action - the "better rate" doesn't get offered because the employer doesn't find it necessary.

[sadie]

There is no market in archaeology that can be relied upon to raise wages. In years of boom we got precisely nothing from our employers even though we were all really busy. That is a dead duck, an idea pedalled by unit managers to shut us up. Will never happen.

Also, asking diggers to set their own pay or demand a certain wage is impossible for them. We have all worked for 80 quid a week to get the experience, doesn't mean its right though.

Sorry to put a downer on this, just feeling particularly cynical this morning.

[BAJR]

@ Chiz.

[QUOTE]its your site and you can post what you want, but some of us are still fighting to keep the minima right up to the wire. We really don't need any distractions and I don't think it makes worried Diggers feel any better seeing someon

[BAJR]

Sorry to put a downer on this, just feeling particularly cynical this morning.

No worries. this is what it is about.

today is the day... and i am quietly confident that sense will prevail. Even if for some rather odd reason it does not. even then... it is never over. BAJR ( and others )
never backs down.

[BAJR]

Sorry to put a downer on this, just feeling particularly cynical this morning.

No worries. this is what it is about.

today is the day... and i am quietly confident that sense will prevail. Even if for some rather odd reason it does not. even then... it is never over. BAJR never backs down.

Added for clarification

Now what is clear is that companies need guidelines it helps create structure - and so getting rid of safety net minima would basically destroy the system... If that is the case ( which i believe to be true ) then for the Ifa to remove minima would be detrimental as a whole. The BAJR Grade system however, needs work - it needs to grow... and support in enforcement. but how?

Anyway... Best of luck today.. kick ass and marshal the arguments.. and win.!

[RedEarth]

Please don't, your system is so immensely helpful and sensible and enables a really good structure. If only more people used it. Would the 'safety net' not run the risk of becoming the lowest common denominator?

[BAJR]

Sounds like the system needs to be supported by IfA then?
Another way to reinforce their minima

[Unitof1]

When BAJR brought in the Grades - it was at a time when some structure was required...

well yes, its nice to have structure, but mostly no, the structure was all wrong!

What went on then and is still going on in archaeology now is that a "salary" structure was imposed on intermitant contract work at places of work which were transient in strict taxation terms. That the salary structures have tried to have grades and spinal points is the legacy of the public service origins of the whole of rescue archaeology.

In creating a salary structure the first significant things that were overlooked were copyrights and royalties.

Attack the spinal points, you attack the grades and then you are attacking the concept of salaries (and pension funding capabilities) and as the majority of the ifa-who are not dependant on intermitant contract work at places of work which were transient, are on salaries I imagine that they love the security that is offered by concept of spinal points and grades being reinforced by the ifa.

But we should also remember that whats being qwibbled about is minimas for a grade of membership at the ifa. If you take any of the mifas I bet that not a single one of their salaried jobs is dependant on them being a mifa, if you were to imagine that a mifa is some individual archaeologist with "sole responsiblity for the project". They dont do projects, they have reviews and local plans and go to meetings to arange going to other meetings. (although there are now a few self employed mifas I bet they claim the minimum earnings to minimis their subscriptions and I dnt see how they should be concered with salary levels unless its what to expolit the next archaeologist out of).

You cant be in a salaried job description position and do the lot from digging, to directing, to writing up everything, to getting the contract, so thats why they had to invent RAOs. So being a mifa has bugger all to do with what ever jobs they do apart from possibly those who think that being a mifa in a RO is going to save them from the ressesion and thats probably because they have some service level agreement covering their salaries.

Seems to me that you have to kick the whole of "salaries" into touch for field archaeology and that I think would include minima -apart from that of the law of the land. How does it work instead?

[P Prentice]

please keep the grades. they are the only terms of reference that span the industry. people can use them to see where they stand and where they want to be.
they do need to include pensions ultimately for pensions will soon divide us all!!

[GnomeKing]

copyrights and royalties.

(alas!; still this lies near the dark arcane center.....)

Lets see > hatches down-battened > at the ready...