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https://radhr.org/policy/pay-policy/
Hi RadHR team, thanks so much for sharing this pay policy which is so detailed and takes into account so many ways in which workers may need support. My question is… how do we budget for and fund this? If we apply to a funder for project/core costs that include salary costs we cannot predict how much we will need to pay a worker as we may not have hired them yet or their situation may change. Should we budget for the highest possible salary (if all uplifts apply) and return the remainder? This seems almost impossible to fundraise for, especially as a team grows. As an organisation we have been trying to raise salaries for years but we continue to butt up against funder requirements that do not align with more radical ways of paying workers. Josie
Thanks Josie, these are really important questions. I don’t have all the answers, but I’ve talked to a few groups about this recently, and have some (longer-than-expected) thoughts:
Budgeting for new workers: At RadHR we assume a % uplift for any new starter that is a specific amount higher than the average uplift for the current staff, that figure right now is 9%. So if the average worker uplift was 11%, we assume a 20% uplift (11% + 9%) for new starters. I think it is probably important to adjust the additional 9% figure depending on whether your sense is that current workers are (or aren’t) using a lot of the uplifts, e.g. if your workers don’t claim many uplifts, you might want to make that 9% addition higher.
Budgeting for uplift changes: One thing the socially-just pay calculator (that we’re working on) does is give you a approximate figure for how much every extra 1% of uplift will cost the organisation (including pension and National Insurance contributions). This is something you can then use to budget for potential worker uplift increases. So if that 1% cost is £400 for a 4 day-per-week worker, you can then use that to budget for worker uplift increases, e.g. 10% = ~£4k, ~20% = ~£8k. The other thing you can do is to budget a certain % higher for each worker every year, but that effectively amounts to the same thing.
Budgeting generally: This kind of policy does make contingency funds / unexpected costs and reserves more important. I’m not sure there’s any way around that. The organisation needs to be putting some funds aside for potential changes in worker costs, even if the hope is that the uplifts and downlifts will even out a bit.
Fundraising: RadHR’s current funders are all okay with this policy, but we are mainly core funded and our funders are ones that are willing to fund this kind of work, so they are unlikely to be representative of the wider funding world. I think part of the answer has to come from funders changing their requirements, and from experience that often takes organisations pushing back on things, especially those in more of a position to do so. But that isn’t very helpful right now, and so I think it might end up being case-by-case based on the specific funder’s requirements and also coming back round to annual contingency budgets and reserves etc. “We run a socially just pay system which means worker rates vary between workers and are subject to changing circumstances, this explains rows ##-## and the contingency in row ##, any unspent contingency will go to XYZ.”?
The one other thing I will say—and I want to be clear this is not to downplay the difficult realities, to assume that this is relevant for your group, or to come across as some kind of acolyte of ‘The Secret’ or anything—is that as someone who grew up working class, for a long time I definitely had a strong scarcity mindset when it came to budgets and funders. In my last workplace that often meant colleagues had to challenge some of my instincts to keep salaries lower and assume funders wouldn’t fund non-poverty salaries or contingency/reserves etc. Rarely is that the problem, but from my experience, it can be part of the problem. So sometimes we need to sound out funders or just put things in applications and know that if a funder wants to fund the work, but something procedural is preventing that, they will more-often-than-not talk to you about it. Basically, from my own experience, I think it’s really easy to internalise some messed up values from the wider world on this stuff.
I’d be really happy to schedule a call to chat about this, and maybe others would be interested to join? I’m keen to hear what would and wouldn’t work for groups about this kind of policy, and what some of the funder blocks are etc. Maybe it could be a collective problem-solving session?
Hi Rich,
thanks so much for your extensive response.
There is so much in here that we have been grappling with and are working towards - from rejecting a scarcity mindset and pushing for change with funders to being left without any funding for the whole year in 2023 meaning everyone was unpaid and us having to take on extractive jobs to make ends meet…
A collective session would be very useful and we’d be happy to share our experiences and learn from others.
Warm wishes
Josie