Pay and working conditions

We are all essentially freelance (some of us are about to 'upgrade' to zero hours contracts for legal reasons) so no one has any job security.

We unequal pay based on needs, experience, productivity and market rate (best guess rather than a formula) which ranges between £125 per day and £375 per day. This is a 3:1 ratio and gives us pay of between about £30,000 and £90,000 .In practice, most people who want to work full time.

We don't get sick pay/holiday pay/etc. but have all individually got long term health insurance.

We did previously try setting pay by consent but it didn't go very well - it took six months of everyone being a bit on edge and then one of the members suggested everyone's pay and we all greatly ratified her suggestion.

Pay is now set by people when they join and the members occasionally make resolutions to increase someone's pay. We don't really have a solution for when a person sets pay that is higher than our pay scale would normally suggest.

We're very open to other ways of doing stuff, but have voted several times that we prefer to keep this relatively high pay/low security model.

If some of you are going zero hours that implies you'll be on PAYE, i.e. employed - gives you significant legal rights that self-employed members won't have?

Very interesting, looking forward to hearing more about how everyone does this. UnitedDiversity LLP could almost be described as a Digital Co-op in that most of the work invoiced is tech related, but we're essentially just two freelancers who invoice through the same legal entity - you simply get paid whatever you get paid by the client and then we spilt shared costs like accounting equally. Buffer have interesting open formulas see https://buffer.com/transparency for more on this (and lots more)

All members are going onto zero hours contracts. Some people who are currently contractors might go onto zero hours contracts, and those who've not yet clocked up the one year of service required for membership will remain as contractors.

It's being driven more by The Law and The Accountant than any particular desire to change the way we work. The rights and protection we gain are only against ourselves after all.

Webarchitects is a multi-stakeholder co-op which workers, clients, partners and investors can join, the workers formally have a 50% say in the running of the co-op, but tend to make most day-to-day decisions in practice. We have four workers, one full time (me) and three part time, two of which are techies and two of which are doing admin type work.

We are all paid the same hourly rate, the UK Living Wage, of £8.25 an hour, three of us are on PAYE and one is self employed but that is probably going to change due to the pension arrangements that we need to sort out in the New Year and we will probably all be on PAYE soon.

We don't have fixed holidays or sick leave. In terms of hours, the admin workers do a regular number of hours in the office each week and generally don't work outside the office. I generally work in the office, the other techie never works in the office. The techies don't keep track of their time and probably work more hours than they are paid for most of the time due to having to pick up urgent issues, at all hours, wherever they are.

For holidays and sick leave we take as much as we need. I have a lot of childcare to do so I generally don't come into the office during school holidays and I leave at 3pm to pick kids up from school.

For now the flexibility we have in terms of time worked does compensate for the very low wages, but it isn't really sustainable, we need to pay ourselves far better if we are to continue long term. In order to do that we need more work -- we have been short of work for years.

Two of us met as shop stewards while working at Sheffield Council many, many years ago, so the idea of not having good pay and conditions is an anathema to us, but not having to do daft things for stupid bosses does make this more palatable...

I'd guess you're earning considerably less that most others here... so here's hoping this network will help you to find more well paid work :)

With Open Data Services we've set up with everyone on employment contracts with a flat payroll rate (currently £34,500 p.a FTE) with the goal of providing stable employment for those who might be coming in from other private sector, voluntary sector or freelancing roles. That does come with additional overheads as we head for 2-years old, and start needing to think about redundancy pay reserves, and making sure cashflow can cover sick pay etc. but so far things are working out.

We try and keep things flexible, but have found we need some good HR systems to track leave etc (particularly asked for by members joining from more conventional employment settings than the founders, who came from more freelance backgrounds).

We're set up as Company Limited by Shares, with Co-operative rules, and as each member has a single share, we are currently looking at options to give us the option for all workers (members and non-members) to have some dividend (voted on my members) at year end, relative to the work done in that year (some of us work less than full-time).

Co-operative Web are almost fully PAYE paid (we have a couple of long term contractors that aren't members but are part of the family). We are unequal pay and pay based on the market rates for the skills that someone brings or, when people contribute exceptionally then we often reward them with more money in the same way a private company would.

The pay is set by our "pay committee" which is an elected group from within the elected board of the company. It's been the same two people for a while - one overly enthusiastic who would like everyone to be on massive money and one overly cautious who tempers the enthusiasm. This seems to work well. The board approve the overall budget spend on wages but not individuals (which stops the elected board using their position to try and get more money for themselves).

Our pay ratio among coders is about 2:1. Across the whole company, including the admin staff, it's about 3.5:1.

We also pay pensions, give up to 35 days holiday (plus bank holidays), sick, maternity etc.

I do occasionally wonder about a peer-reviewed pay system somehow where the members set each others pay but I can see that descending into an argument or resentment.

My thoughts about pay, in co-ops:

There's a lot to be said for a flat wage rate per hour with no differential. It reflects the non-hierarchical nature of our co-op (Webarchitects). And it generates a strong feeling of gratitude and commitment among those who (like me) would be paid less than some others if it was a conventional capitalist business.

From the viewpoint of the more skilled/qualified people, if they felt they're of more value to the organisation but have accepted a level playing field on wages, that's great; they're accepting the reality that organisations rely on all the staff, and the success of the co-op is a success for all, equally.

We all have a myriad different skills, qualities etc to contribute, hard to truly reflect in a pay structure. One single pay-grade simply removes that problem! And In the end, at a philosophical level, all we've got is our time. One hour of my life is like one hour of anyone else's.

This is really interesting, thanks for the contributions so far.

Calverts has maintained a flat pay structure for 40 years. No probs.

I really like the idea of a flat pay structure, but we find it much harder to hire decent senior people in our industry even if we offer then £100k per year and I personally wouldn't be up for trying the same feat with £40k on offer.

We ask a lot more of our members than would be expected of them in a commercial organisation and I think we'd struggle if we also wanted to pay them a small fraction of what they'd be paid elsewhere.

On the other end of the spectrum if we paid everyone £100k per year then we wouldn't have any surplus for building megazords and the like. Everyone at Outlandish earns quite a lot more than I did when we started Outlandish so I please Rawl's Veil of Ignorance defence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veil_of_ignorance

We have a flat pay structure too. It has probably made life much easier between us all.

We are a non-profit distributing workers' co-op working entirely with the 3rd and public sector. Pretty much every organisation we work with is under extreme funding pressure just now so their budgets are not exactly large (or have the prospect of increasing). We are definitely not in it for the money.

We have both FT and PT staff on the payroll (PAYE), equal pay of £25K per annum with paid holidays, flexible working, etc etc, all on staff contracts (thanks Coops UK). We didn't always do pay this way, but switched about 3 years after we started up to take lower pay in exchange for a steady pay, then gradually increasing it. We are just introducing pensions this year.

We pay all freelancers a flat rate too of £200/hr and work with some amazing talented people.

We have been struggling to recruit an in-house developer for the last 3 years, though, and not just for pay reasons; we hear again and again that others - as with Outlandish, above - who can offer big pay packets are in the same boat.

@louisescott i preferred it when outlandish had a flat pay structure, though some sort of gerentocracy might be good.

Can i just check you post your freelancers £200/day rather than £200/hr?

Gerontocracy is awful - you end up with people who used to be good, don't learn new stuff, won't budge and think they know best. If you want to acknowledge experience and contribution, give people a certificate or a present (carriage clock, original vinyl of All Right Now by the Free, whatever). But their pay should go down not up (only half joking - compensation relating to need etc).

Amen

/day yes! Well spotted. Obviously I slipped into wishful thinking there ...

In London it's not so far off the going rate!