I love the Rad HR compensation model discussed here ( Socially-just pay and anti-oppression work in practice | RadHR ) and need-based compensation, in general. But one thing I’ve been confused about – if you base compensation off of factors that can change (# of dependents, disability), can you revise the compensation downward? I think that it should be revised downward if your dependents are now all grown up, or you no longer have that disability, or you moved to a much more affordable place, but can organizations get away with this? It seems like it would draw too many questions from HR. Plus I’m guessing staff might be grumpy about it.
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Hi @karenl - thanks for the thoughts on this. The adjustments do go down if people’s circumstances change in all the socially-just wage policies I know. In my situation, for example, I have a nursery age kid, but in September they will start school, and I won’t be paying out nearly as much in nursery bills each month, so my uplift will drop to reflect my real costs. So in real terms, I shouldn’t be worse off at that point (likely better, because the uplift doesn’t nearly cover extortionate nursery bills!).
But in my experience, the bigger question you’re getting at - how people respond to adjustments - is about the process of moving to more equitable pay, and how bought into the model people are. If it’s imposed on them, I can definitely see that it would be harder to make the case that wages will go up and down, as your circumstances change. But if there is a more involved process, where people feel invested in what the model is trying to do, then I’ve never found it to be a problem.
But I’m keen to hear how folks like @Tanya @Jaybird @CGage @OrtGallery or others w/ SJ waging/equitable/needs based pay have found the transitions if anyone’s wage has dropped at some point in their orgs?
Thanks for sharing.
Yeah I realize my question is two-fold and I wasn’t clear about that. One aspect is the ‘how do humans deal with it?’ and the other aspect is ‘will HR even allow salaries to go down?’. Our org is fiscally sponsored so we have to play by the rules of their HR department. The picture that I get is that HR gets nervous when we talk about salaries going down. I presume they’re worried that it increases the chance of some kind of employment-related lawsuit. Any experience with that aspect of it?