5th September 2008, 03:12 PM
Quote:quote:"It is worth noting that at least one archaology company, LG, is a co-operative."Of course, a cooperative is still a private-sector company and still tries to make a profit. The difference is only in how the profit is distributed.
Any organisation must obtain at least as much money as it spends. If it wants to expand, to innovate, to improve its service, or to increase pay and conditions for its workers, it must obtain more money than it spends, and in commercial work that additional money is called 'profit'. For non-commercial work, any above-inflation increase in funding could be seen as equivalent to profit.
Therefore, an archaeological unit that fails to make a profit can never improve either the quality of what it does or the pay and conditions of its workers. The more profit it makes, the more potential it has to do both of those things.
On that basis, you could argue that, far from being immoral, it is a moral imperative for an archaeological unit to make a profit. Any potential immorality would not lie in making a profit, but in what you do with it.
If a unit is profitable, but fails to reinvest in the kind of improvements I outlined above (including wages and conditions), that could be seen as immoral.
In relation specifically to 'poverty wages' it is worth noting that, throughout the economy, the most profitable activities are the ones that attract the highest wages. In any profitable business, a proportion of profit normally goes into wage increases. That would suggest that the only way out of poverty wages is to increase profitability, and that part of the reason why archaeological wages are so low is that the organisations have traditionally been either non-profit making or have made very low profits.
How that proportion is distributed amongst different categories of worker is a different question, and there are certainly moral issues there.
1man1desk
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