28th January 2013, 12:36 PM
Thank you for taking the time to reply doug. In no way do I intend to âhave a go at youâ. I see you as someone working in archaeology. You have picked up a contract and thatâs absolutely the way it is. The thing is that we know that there is no one who would answer for these bizarre self-appointed donât exist in the financial world bodies EH, HS, Cadw, DOE, and EU LLP ALGAO who like to ponce about positing the word âarchaeologyâ whilst they build up property portfolios or jobsworths like HERs on which to hang their unfunded pensions. (At least the ifa is a limited company and we can watch as it finances burn).
What does seem necessary for them to get away with pretending that they are the core of the archaeological world is that they need to go around getting their salaries mixed up with the pay of field workers so that they can mince around politicians and call themselves archaeologists. Thing is that the fieldworkers get swamped by this attitude that the profession is so all encompassing of these so called historic environment workers that we think that we will get long term workers rights like pensions, holidays when the reality is that we work on contracts no matter what unit and that if there are no contracts there can be no jobs. This is one reason why the ifa salary minimum are rediculus, one contract does not gaurentee another, pay me £22000 pro rata for a week and dole for the next five does not a salary make.
What I would like to see is a survey that assessed the numbers of contracts per area, length of contract, source of contract, type of contract, how many people worked on the contract. Seems to me that in your position you could contribute to that survey in a meaningful way rather than I wonder how you would fill the current one in and best of all we might find out what most of the curators of this world are taking from the council tax(or probably find that suddenly they are nothing to do with the historic environmenty thingy but are in highways and planning)
Alternatively maybe you could produce a set of results that does not include any fieldworkers.
What does seem necessary for them to get away with pretending that they are the core of the archaeological world is that they need to go around getting their salaries mixed up with the pay of field workers so that they can mince around politicians and call themselves archaeologists. Thing is that the fieldworkers get swamped by this attitude that the profession is so all encompassing of these so called historic environment workers that we think that we will get long term workers rights like pensions, holidays when the reality is that we work on contracts no matter what unit and that if there are no contracts there can be no jobs. This is one reason why the ifa salary minimum are rediculus, one contract does not gaurentee another, pay me £22000 pro rata for a week and dole for the next five does not a salary make.
What I would like to see is a survey that assessed the numbers of contracts per area, length of contract, source of contract, type of contract, how many people worked on the contract. Seems to me that in your position you could contribute to that survey in a meaningful way rather than I wonder how you would fill the current one in and best of all we might find out what most of the curators of this world are taking from the council tax(or probably find that suddenly they are nothing to do with the historic environmenty thingy but are in highways and planning)
Alternatively maybe you could produce a set of results that does not include any fieldworkers.
Reason: your past is my past