I think the argument for Supervisors is pretty unstoppable and unfortunately the organisation (charity or not) will have to find a way to restore the differential in some way. Its unrealistic to expect people to take on the higher level duties at the same level of pay and whilst you could try and fool around with things like hours of work, holidays etc in the end I think you will be forced to increase the pay.

The argument for Administrators is different. If you do not believe they are doing work of a significantly higher value then you can resist the request for a wage increase on economic grounds - you may well lose a few administrators along the way - but its down to how you communicate it.

In reply to Keith:

Thanks Keith, we knew really that this would be the case, I think we were just hoping someone may have a brilliant idea to help us manage the increasing costs.

We faced a similar problem in our charity in 2015, having become Living Wage employers (under the Foundation Living Wage) in 2014, only for the FLW in 2015 to leap up 5.9%. We calculated that it would take our entire organization's pay-rise budget just to accommodate the FLW rise for our lowest paid. As a result, we had to ditch the FLW and let ourselves drop below it.

Now, with the NLW being enforced in law, organizations that pay at NLW are having to play a careful game of bluff and counter-bluff with the Treasury in an attempt to anticipate what the next NLW uplift will be. However, the Conservative party does have a manifesto pledge to raise the NLW to £9.00 per hour by 2020, which should give us a sense of the speed and direction of increase. The consequence, if you want to provide equal pay rises across the board to your staff, is that you need to play that guessing game and budget accordingly for the next three years.

The alternative - OK, it's not really an alternative, but it's something you might like to think about doing *as well* - is to take a long, hard look at your pay structure. If there are senior roles with competitive salaries - especially if they are bespoke to individuals rather than based on a job evaluation of any sort - then you may have to negotiate some sort of pay harmonization and freeze on senior salaries in order to ensure enough in the budget for the next three years to meet the salary rises of your lowest paid.

For organizations like charities, that are built on compassion and which often have cultures of going the extra mile and doing the right thing, whatever the cost, it can be hard to stare inevitable cut-backs and potential redundancies in the face. But you are better off starting now (or, y'know, two years ago when we knew this was going to happen).

Fortunately, this also gives you an "out" for any individual employees or employee groups muttering about parity. The answer "in the light of the current economy, we are conducting a broad-spectrum review of how we meet the demands of the law and the expectations of employees most effectively and your concerns will be addressed in full by this process in due course" tends to shut people up.

I have this problem in my organisation and the living wage increase has had a massive impact. I'm food manufacturing and about 90% of my workforce are hourly paid. Approximately 50% are paid the living wage and the rest are paid more on a differential basis depending on their skills. We have basically had to increase nearly everyone by 30p. Last year I managed to off-set some of it by reducing the night shift allowance but this year we have had to take the full hit.

In reply to Laura Ann:

The Labour Party have pledged the minimum wage to be £10 per hour in 2020 so to take up the previous point, wages structures are going to be put under a lot of pressure within the next few years. Therefore it is worth spending the time to not only look at the wage systems but the wider view of reward and productivity.

Wages are always a sensitive issue for charities but irrespective of the industry, wages will increasingly become compressed at the lower end and so a long hard think about the next 5 - 10 years would probably be time well spent

In reply to Steven :

Of course, the compression of lower rates of pay would be less of a problem if we didn't have to deal with this sort of nonsense:

www.glassdoor.com/.../

I'm sure, however, that this isn't a problem for Cath or Laura Ann... ;)

In reply to Robey:

Fully agree Robey and these are just the published figures, there will no doubt be much higher ratios for esoteric organisations and those who have very complex structures but at a much more mundane level I am not sure I would want to be a supervisor for £100 a year more than the workers

In reply to Robey:

The issue I have had with Glassdoor on salaries is that the rates of pay they have published for my organisation have been wildly inaccurate but when I contacted them, they said the information had come from a reliable source and they would not take it down. They also published salaries for jobs that we don't have (Senior Scientist was one) and I emailed them about this but got the same response.