IFA REPLY TO THE PETITION FOR CHANGE

Last year, The Digger and BAJR launched the Petition for Change. Hundreds of archaeologists signed the petition which called for a decent career structure and an end to poverty pay. Here is the IFA’s reply to the Petition and the open letter in Digger 28:

The IFA is grateful for the support that the letter and petition indicate for its long- running campaign to increase wages in archaeology. Until the profession can successfully address this issue, archaeologists will continue to be rewarded below the level we merit, driving talented people out of the profession before they can establish a career. This situation prevents us from serving either our commercial clients or the public as well as we should.

It is apparent from the letter that there may not be universal support for the IFA’s tactics, but we can all agree on two things: that pay in archaeology is scandalously low, and that the IFA recommended minima are much lower than we would all like them to be. Unfortunately we are up against some harsh realities in terms of market forces, with an oversupply of archaeologists and an undersupply of work. Even in such a situation a professional institute can still have a significant effect, but its impact is severely compromised when two-thirds of the profession do not sign up to its code of professional ethics, preferring to leave regulation in the hands of the marketplace rather than the profession. With, at a guess, a similar proportion of archaeologists refusing to join their trades union, perhaps we have what we deserve.

In such circumstances it’s worth exploring two scenarios suggested by the petition. The first is the IFA dramatically raising its recommended minima and strong-arming its Registered Archaeological Organisations (RAOs) into significant wage increases. The RAOs would then have to decide whether to increase costs, with the consequence that they lose contracts to unregistered organisations and make their staff redundant, presumably to work for the unregulated competition at below the recommended minima. The second is the union members agreeing to refuse to work for the less than the minima: this, as now, would surely result in jobs being taken by non-union members prepared to accept lower wages. Simplistic and extreme scenarios perhaps, but enough to suggest that a more subtle approach is required.

The first limb of the IFA strategy is to identify the roles that archaeologists fulfill, the skills required to carry out those roles, the training needed to provide those skills, the qualifications that indicate that those skills have been obtained, and the IFA membership grade that recognises the skills, and so to argue about the pay and conditions that reward the expertise denoted by the IFA grade and qualifications. This is the route successfully taken by other professional bodies such as those representing, engineers, scientists, accountants and the like. The National Occupational Standards for Archaeological Practice now give us the first two elements, allowing us to proceed to developing the structures for training, qualifications, recognition and reward: importantly expressed in the terms that human resources professionals understand and using arguments they accept.

The second line of attack is to encourage recognition of the importance of ‘qualified, specially authorised’ archaeologists (to quote the Valletta Convention) by government, clients, consultants and curators with their responsibilities for ensuring that work of an appropriate quality is done. This is how other professions, with a recognised career structure, put in place thresholds of competence and quality that ensure that the underskilled and undercosting organisations find it hard to win work. And this is what we are pressing the national heritage agencies, ODPM, APPAG and others to help us with.

This is a long-term plan. This reflects the IFA’s belief that radical changes to pay rates will not be achieved if all other aspects of archaeology stay as they are, though modest improvements will continue to be won. The IFA is delighted to be working closely with the Archaeology Training Forum and Prospect to bring about a proper career and reward structure for archaeologists. An alliance of professional institute and trade union is how these things are done. Many signatories to the petition will be IFA or Prospect members. We hope that the signatures of those that are neither is an indication that they are about to join both organisations to help with this campaign, rather than standing aside waiting for others to produce miracles.

IFA Documents on Profesional Archaeology : http://www.archaeologists.net/profession.html