Last year, New Working Majority launched our first-ever salary survey, asking people who work in movement organizations about their starting salaries, current rates of pay, and the benefits they received at work. If you didn’t see it in 2023, you can read the report from last year’s salary survey here.
Spoiler–if you haven’t read last year’s survey, what we found is that movement jobs began to experience wage stagnation after the 2007/2008 recession. Despite relatively big jumps in wages in some parts of our sector (particularly in field jobs), wages overall have not caught up to inflation yet. And in the worst news of all–the people who experience the most dissatisfaction in salary levels are the people who have the most experience.
Spoiler–if you haven’t read last year’s survey, what we found is that movement jobs began to experience wage stagnation after the 2007/2008 recession. Despite relatively big jumps in wages in some parts of our sector (particularly in field jobs), wages overall have not caught up to inflation yet. And in the worst news of all–the people who experience the most dissatisfaction in salary levels are the people who have the most experience.
As recruiters who came from labor organizing, that doesn’t sit well with us. We know that our movements need Journeypeople and Adepts to develop campaign strategy, to train new organizers and leaders, and to help give perspective on what an actual career in this sector can look like. That can’t happen if the most experienced folks are leaving every year because they need to make more money.
We also know that you need metrics if you want to measure growth, so we’ve committed to running this survey every year, to measure how the movement is doing in salary satisfaction. In June, we’ll be launching our second annual salary survey, asking movement organizers about what they were paid when they started, what they’re paid now, and to tell us something about the benefits that they receive from their organizations.
We’ll also be trying something new this year, which is to collect (and publish) data about average salaries in a variety of different positions. We often have people ask us things like, “what’s a competitive salary for a Policy Director?” and we’d like to be able to answer questions like that with some hard data, in addition to our anecdotal knowledge, and what we see posted on job listings.
Our commitment this year is to make that data transparent as well (to the extent that we are able to collect it). If we are able to collect a statistically significant level of data about particular positions, we will be releasing that in the report that we’ll write about this year’s data. We’d love it if you were able to use that kind of information while negotiating for your next job!
To better understand our use of these terms, read this post: Life Cycle of an Organizer
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