Opening up the market - keeping the safety net

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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?