Gilad Isaacs, IEJ Executive Director
We are pleased to be publishing the Institute for Economic Justice’s (IEJ) new Remuneration Policy. This is the culmination of over a year’s worth of research, consultations, and deliberations. It is the product of a highly transparent and engaged process with all IEJ staff, external service providers, partners, and the IEJ Board. This began with a workshop with all staff assessing the status quo, and ended with Board review and approval of the Policy.
One of the reasons this Policy took so many hours to formulate and agree on is that setting salaries in the social justice sector, in a country with huge inequalities, against the backdrop of a political and economic system that deliberately disadvantaged particular groups, is incredibly complex. The IEJ team grappled with how our values of justice, fairness, and equity mean both compensating fairly, especially in light of historic disadvantages, while trying to avoid reinforcing compensation norms that unduly favour top earners.
To add to this complexity, the IEJ straddles sectors with vastly different salary norms. On the one hand, the IEJ is staffed by activist researchers who are connected with social movements and labour unions. On the other, the IEJ competes for highly educated staff against government departments, universities, and other professionalised research organisations and private-sector consultancies. This makes the technical exercise of benchmarking complicated while throwing up deeper questions about who we are serving and who we should be comparing ourselves against.
For all of these reasons, we started the process by defining what values and principles should guide the Policy. Through detailed consultations, we settled on the following nine principles:
- Value-based compensation: The IEJ’s remuneration policy must align with the organisation’s values and mission.
- Fairness and equity: The IEJ’s remuneration policy must be fair and equitable for all employees regardless of their gender, race, religion, or any other personal characteristic.
- Transparency: The IEJ will ensure that its remuneration policy is transparent, communicated to all employees, and available to the public. This includes providing clear guidelines for how salaries are determined and how performance evaluations are conducted. This will include disclosure of salary bands but not individual employees’ salaries.
- Diversity, equity and inclusion: The IEJ’s remuneration policy must promote diversity, equity, and inclusion within the organisation, ensuring the attainment of a staff complement that gives expression to those values.
- Addressing historic inequities: The IEJ’s remuneration policy must take proactive measures to address historic inequities and injustices along race and gender lines, including considering the broader financial obligations of historically disadvantaged persons within their extended family networks.
- Competitiveness: The IEJ must achieve and maintain competitive salary bands in line with comparator organisations. This must be done in a manner that balances market competitiveness and pay equity, pays fair wages and attracts and retains skilled employees, including those from historically disadvantaged groups.
- Reducing pay inequality: The IEJ’s remuneration policy should include measures to limit pay gaps across salary bands, such as, maintaining a reasonable and transparent pay ratio between senior and junior staff.
- Periodic review: The IEJ’s remuneration policy should be periodically reviewed to ensure that it remains fair and appropriate. This should include benchmarking salary bands against relevant peer organisations.
- Employee involvement: The IEJ’s remuneration policy should be developed and updated with the participation of the IEJ’s staff.
Only after that, did we proceed to the more technical components of benchmarking, job grading, and salary setting. The end result, summarising the complexity that appears in this document, are salary scales that compare fairly against our more professionalised peers but are capped at the upper end to avoid excessively high salaries for top senior management. This means IEJ salaries likely significantly exceed those of some comrades we work with in movement environments, while likely being too low to attract some away from higher-paying government or private-sector jobs. We hope to have found fair and viable salary levels congruent with our values.
We wanted our process followed and this Policy, including the salary ranges contained, to be public. Prospective applicants for IEJ jobs should know what they may earn before applying. Current staff should understand how their own salary package fits within the organisation. And we hope our peers will offer us useful feedback from which we can learn.
I am proud that this Policy represents a sincere and inclusive attempt to grapple with a highly charged issue in a transparent and values-driven way. The IEJ team is stronger as a result of this process.