Salut Thierry,
Le 03/02/2012 19:38, Thierry Coudray a écrit :
I open this discussion as this issue arise for WMFr and its professionalization, and I believe same for others chapters. I would like to know if the foundation or others chapters who have recruited or will do it have define a wage policy and have decide a public transparency for this wages.
Wikimedia France had an employee during less than one year before we separated through a negociation.It's salary was not published but easy to find in our accounts as he was our only employee. We then recruited within a short period, 3 employees with a permanent contract and one with fixed-term contractin charge of the fundraising. So it raised the question of wage policy, equity between employees, and transparency of wages. Even more because some of this employees are former WMFr volunteers.
In France, the practice is that the wages in charities or NGOs are generally 15 to 20% below market value. Difficult to check for small organizationsbecause in France, it's culturally not easy to speak/disclose personal wage even if things are changing. Difficult also because some jobs in charities are very specific and sometimes do not have their equivalent in the job-market. If a charities or NGOs received more than 50 000 € of public money (from public administration, cities, etc.), the organization has to disclose it's more 3 highest wages, post and name of the post-holder. But most of the time, this disclosure is not easy to find for an ordinary donator as you should do where to find it, most of the time in an annex, lost in the middle of accountings documents.
We have discussions on this point on WMFr board, and personaly I'm a for the higher wages transparancy we can, for our members and donators, despite cultural curbs.
The legal safeguards seem to be in place in France (disclosure of highest salaries) to ensure that noone is paid above what the organisation can and should afford, so why the need for total transparency? It's a real question, I always have a hard time when we try to apply the "Recent changes, everyone can see everything" policy to our real life organisations, so I'm trying to understand what you would like to achieve with maximum transparency. Or did I not understand you and you meant just "transparency for the higher wages?".
This said, I believe that transparency can take many forms. In this case, I would suggest that an option might be putting in place a solid salary grid (grille salariale), which gives a range of what salary can be expected for what position (the grid can be "broad" enough so that people don't feel their salary has been disclosed). Cultural and local practices need to be taken into consideration of course (as Stu pointed out, align with the local job market to some extent).
A grid may also have the important effect of telling people who are joining the organisation what kind of progress they can expect within it, which I find is both reassuring and motivating for employees. It also helps the management to think about what structure to give the organisation. Wikimedia Deutschland published not too long ago a plan for hiring and staff which, if it is just a "plan" also brought up the question of "how do we want to organize in the future?" and that was, I think, extremely helpful, as it structured the way employees see their job and future within the organisation.
Cheers,
Delphine