Did we though?
One notion that I keep seeing pop up here and there around the work I did for Essex County Council over the pandemic and in the years afterwards (so March 2020 until the end of March 2024) is that a number of us were all paid different amounts of money to carry out the same work. There’s no easy way to say this, but that idea is at best, misleading, and at worst, completely and utterly inaccurate and yet another attempt to smear myself and those who commissioned and administered the work.
There are always plenty of arguments out there about ‘value for money’ and ‘being asked to make payments to other individuals and businesses,’ but in this blog I want to concentrate on that one notion and try to provide you all with some information so that you can make your own judgements about the allegation that a number of people on the project all carried out the same of work for varying amounts of compensation.
It’s worth having a look at the payment data for myself and every colleague on the dedicated section of the Essex County Council website – the payments themselves are listed on the attached sheet about halfway down the page. As I have said before, this BBC News article probably gives the most balanced commentary of these numbers for my own situation.
The largest Facebook page within this project was Essex Coronavirus Action, that would go on to become Essex Is United when the pandemic finally started to ‘take a back seat.’ Facebook pages in themselves form a handy archive of content over time, but there’s one crucial piece of information that isn’t displayed to the observer on the outside looking in – the human identity behind each post. If some voices are to be believed, the 7,435* pieces of content analysed will show a roughly equal amount attributed to each admin involved in the project, but the reality is very different. I actually created approximately 97.9% of all of the content published on the Essex Coronavirus Action / Essex Is United Facebook page.
*It is entirely possible that this number includes an amount of Facebook group interactions as the page identity as well, for reasons described below, meaning that there may be a small discrepancy between this figure and other ‘post totals’ that are out there.
It is important to point out that I was not responsible for the Essex Coronavirus Action / Essex Is United Instagram and Twitter social media accounts, and I would encourage anyone to take a look at these before making any overall judgements, taking into account potential content that has been duplicated from Facebook.
Unfortunately, Facebook doesn’t make it easy to get ‘admin by admin’ post creation statistics for a particular period of time. Although logged in admin users can see the human identity for each posted created next to the published date, as per the famous Barry The Seagull here …
… scrolling through the main page feed in order to analyse four years of posting history is a major arse that makes my laptop’s cooling fan start to sound like a 747 engine at takeoff.
There is a slightly easier way to get this data in bitesize chunks, and that is by visiting the page’s ‘Activity Log’ and asking for the information on a month-by-month basis, such as this:
With a small amount of scrolling, you can get the whole month ‘in view’, and then it is simply a case of searching for the names of each admin and counting how many times they appear next to a piece of published content.
DULL SPREADSHEET ALERT – this is the breakdown of monthly posting activity on the Essex Coronavirus Action / Essex Is United Facebook page per admin user:
Just to be clear:
- ‘Simon Harris’ – That’s me (hello).
- ‘SH Backup 1’ – That’s a backup account of mine (hello, again).
- ‘Admin 2’ – That’s an ex-colleague of mine. I have merged all of their main and backup profiles into one column.
- ‘Admin 3’ – That’s another colleague of mine that I was checking, but to be fair their main duties revolved around the sister group and not posting on the page.
- ‘SH Backup 3’ – That’s another backup account of mine (hello, again). I’m going to be honest – I have no idea what happened to ‘SH Backup 2.’ Maybe he was on the toilet for four years.
One of the drawbacks of ‘Activity Log’ on Facebook is that it also counts times when an admin interacts on a Facebook group using the page’s identity instead of their own, but from what I have seen these interactions wouldn’t have made a huge difference to the numbers and the general proportions above.
I’m not saying for one minute that other people working on the project didn’t have other responsibilities of their own – I have said on a number of occasions that my own responsibilities stretched beyond posting page content (attending meetings, assisting other officials from ECC / NHS partner organisations with comms issues … even telling someone from Defra on one occasion that demanding that people submit details of any kept poultry by fax machine during an avian flu outbreak was a tad silly).
What I hope that I have demonstrated here is that just blurting out that ‘we all did the same work’ was, to use a slightly more scientific term, bollocks. That ECC link above also states who was contracted for what, and when, which in a way also pushes back against that same narrative.
Obviously I have had to remove names for this blog as the last thing I want to do is inadvertently ‘bully’ anyone, and at the same time I am also aware that I am expecting you all to just ‘take my word for it.’ You are of course entitled to your opinions and have the right to read this all with scepticism, but what I will say is that I have saved the HTML for each monthly activity log. Therefore, if the situation arises where I need someone to independently verify this data, it’s no problem at all.
As always, feel free to drop me a line if you have any questions – it’s mbdcustomerservices@gmail.com. Keep it clean, keep it legal.
