6th August 2010, 08:44 PM
I suppose what this does is at least confirm most people's general feeling that things are still pretty tight, but at least not getting much worse, even if the promised happy days are still just a distant promise in the eyes of the tenders and recruitment managers, though friends in consultancy suggest that they're very busy, so things may start to trickle through.
There's some fluctuation caused by a small number of very big jobs, which you'd expect in commercial digging. It's been like that in all the units I've worked where one or two bigger jobs account for a scarily proportion of turnover. But that's the reason why archaeology has such a hire'em and fire'em employment profile. I think a lot of medium-sized units bucking the trend have done so off the back of a couple of big jobs, while a couple with really bad results have just missed out one or two opportunities. It's watching the general trend (which looks alarmingly steady for the last year or so) that will give us any real idea. The really big and really small units seem to be a lot more stable, and it's those in the middle who seem to have had the worst of it. Then again, I don't know whether we'd ever hear of the one-and two man bands going under, and I don't have many sole trader friends...
What really strikes me is that even compared to the last time I was out of work for long in 1999, and except for the really depressing bit in late 2008 when everyone seemed to be closing up and working three-day weeks, there's a lot more work out there. Which seems to suggest that contract archaeology can regard itself as established, if still shaky.
There's some fluctuation caused by a small number of very big jobs, which you'd expect in commercial digging. It's been like that in all the units I've worked where one or two bigger jobs account for a scarily proportion of turnover. But that's the reason why archaeology has such a hire'em and fire'em employment profile. I think a lot of medium-sized units bucking the trend have done so off the back of a couple of big jobs, while a couple with really bad results have just missed out one or two opportunities. It's watching the general trend (which looks alarmingly steady for the last year or so) that will give us any real idea. The really big and really small units seem to be a lot more stable, and it's those in the middle who seem to have had the worst of it. Then again, I don't know whether we'd ever hear of the one-and two man bands going under, and I don't have many sole trader friends...
What really strikes me is that even compared to the last time I was out of work for long in 1999, and except for the really depressing bit in late 2008 when everyone seemed to be closing up and working three-day weeks, there's a lot more work out there. Which seems to suggest that contract archaeology can regard itself as established, if still shaky.