22nd September 2012, 12:01 PM
I think the limited increases observed in the boom years is telling, because it seemed to show that employers would only pay as little as they could, even when paying more would have led to better retention and the money was there. I'm not sure that this really has anything to do with LAs: there are enough wholly-ccmmercial units who are free to pay whatever they feel the job is worth. I suspect the fundamental issue is that there is an oversupply of labour in a business where staff costs are the main element of a project, leading to depressed wages because all diggers are assumed to be interchangable. It doesn't have to be this way - any project manager with a free hand would pay their good diggers double rather than have useless ones there to make up the numbers, and get more work done better. The trouble is that demand for staff inevitably varies from time to time, making a permanent team difficult to sustain. I think the "skills passport" approach to validating the good diggers is the best way to inform a labour market where expertise is recionised and rewarded.