We need to talk about charity pay.
We need to have a serious conversation about fair pay for charity workers.
Especially with inflation now at 7% and rising.
I was helping a consultancy client recently with a restructure and considering experienced coordinator-level posts - salary reasonably around the £28-30k mark. I then saw a role with significant management level responsibilities, with a wealthy national charity for London Living Wage (C.£21k). Rather than congratulate them for offering LLW, I wanted to ask how they could pay that little. They were particularly interested in employing people from their own client group. That seems even worse.
We squeeze the stone as hard as we can. We do more with less. We burn the candle at both ends. We expect people who are values-driven will accept low salaries and insane job-inflation. But at what point are we essentially exploiting committed people? At what point do we become part of the problem of in-work poverty in the UK? Do our ends justify our means? (I know arts & culture, fashion, even the NHS do this. But that doesn't make it okay.)
Several things worry me. Many staff are part-time, which can make them financially vulnerable, and often 'under-employed'. Many are employed from the very communities we are trying to help - are we taking advantage of their good will, or of the fact that they may feel safer with us? We have a women-led workforce - are we implictly supporting gender pay disparity by virtue of who our workforce is? Perhaps worst, the people we pay least are often those who actually face our clients. What does that say about how we value them, and indeed, our beneficiaries?
It's easy enough to say that funders make us do it. Local Governments have, especially in urban deprived areas been (worse than) financially starved. Charities I know are delivering double what they were ten years ago for the same Local Authority contract price. They are struggling. The size of Trusts' maximum grant awards seems to stay static, even while trusts’ fund sizes (and our staff’s cost of living) increase.
Those are real reasons, but we do always have to come back to our principles, which must go beyond a singular - and, I think, simplistic - belief that it is ‘all about the beneficiary’. And while for smaller charities, there's barely any wiggle room, some underpaying charities have significant private incomes, trading, or major individual giving. They have considerable autonomy. At some point, underpay becomes a matter of culture, not just of business necessity.
For the rest of us, when do we say enough is enough, and do *less* with less? This is as anathema to me as any other current or former charity CEO, but at some point, we're kicking negative outcomes up/downstream. And we're the ones hitting the 'post job' button.
Where should trustees sit on this? What kind of influencing needs to happen? Where do we draw the boundary? All good questions. But can we afford to keep paying people so poorly?
““Exploiting junior staff by exchanging their mental health and financial security for a career with ‘meaning’ is unethical. Sadly this will be borne out in sick leave, burnout and staff turnover.””
““Adding to the squeeze is that any external benchmarking is against the same low average” ”
“As Charity CEO your post is spot on, I would also add that many funders do not offer much in the way of core costs or this is the first area in a grant to be squeezed. How can a charity build in cost of living rises if there is so little flexibility in a grant. I can’t remember the last time I saw a budget line for inflation increases”