When I visited Mongragon worker coop in 2016, I was explained that they have salary multipliers between x1- x6, meaning theoretically that the highest paid person earned 6 times more than the minimum - although in practice it was more like x3 - x6.
So if the practical pay difference is just twice as much, (and it shrinks further after progressive taxation), I wonder if it makes sense to just divide the profit equally among members and not differentiate salary at all.
Are there worker coops that pay equal salary to everyone?
Iām pretty sure that Suma and Unicorn (not sure if anyone from those co-ops is on this forum) have completely flat pay.
I think where there are advanced/niche skills required, it gets more difficult to have flat pay. For example, we need to attract senior software engineers - and we already pay lower than market rate, but we couldnāt afford to pay everyone Ā£375/day (our current top rate). Our ratio is 3:1 and our cleaner is included in that.
Weāve been redoing our pay system and will have a meeting about it today, so that ratio might change. Iād be interested to know how much power Mondragon members have over their pay/if they get the opportunity to feed into the process.
At Common Knowledge weāre on a flat payment scheme, understood as the day rate.
Itās relatively uncontroversial and important for us as a political principle. We averaged our pre-coop wages to arrive at the figure.
On the other hand, this rate does not consider the āreproductionā of the coop: we donāt know what the organisers and cleaners of our office Space4 are being paid, nor of our accountants etc., and we arenāt wedded to any particular rate for any contractors we hire-in for particular projects.
Yep, we pay a flat hourly rate at Unicorn Grocery, currently Ā£12.50/hr, plus bonuses. One thing to note is that all members āmulti taskā (multi-skill is probably a more accurate term), so will combine, say IT (in my case) with shelf stacking, cleaning, warehouse work etc, as well as management tasks.
Update on our pay review: we started it but didnāt manage to finish it. It was a really good process! And a lot of us reflected how far weāve come - a 18 months ago it would have been too emotional/tricky to go through a really transparent process.
It also makes me think of dynamics and creating a healthy and safe working environment from a psychological perspective. We (Outlandish) take it seriously and have indirectly spent a lot of time preparing through communication training and sociocracy.
Calverts has equal flat pay and have operated that for 42 years. All employees are hourly paid rather than salaried. The current rate is Ā£19.45/hour, with 1.25 and 1.5 overtime rates for excess (over 37.5 hours average in a pay month) or unsocial hours.
Yes, all the members of We Are Open Co-op earn the same. However the twist is that weāre not āemployeesā so it depends on the project day rate.
In practice, that means that there could be two projects where one day rate is twice the other one. However, within each project each member is paid the same day rate.
