Gilad Isaacs, IEJ Executive Director
We are pleased to be publishing the Institute for Economic Justice’s (IEJ) new Remuneration Policy. This is the culmination of over a year’s worth of research, consultations, and deliberations. It is the product of a highly transparent and engaged process with all IEJ staff, external service providers, partners, and the IEJ Board. This began with a workshop with all staff assessing the status quo, and ended with Board review and approval of the Policy.
One of the reasons this Policy took so many hours to formulate and agree on is that setting salaries in the social justice sector, in a country with huge inequalities, against the backdrop of a political and economic system that deliberately disadvantaged particular groups, is incredibly complex. The IEJ team grappled with how our values of justice, fairness, and equity mean both compensating fairly, especially in light of historic disadvantages, while trying to avoid reinforcing compensation norms that unduly favour top earners.
To add to this complexity, the IEJ straddles sectors with vastly different salary norms. On the one hand, the IEJ is staffed by activist researchers who are connected with social movements and labour unions. On the other, the IEJ competes for highly educated staff against government departments, universities, and other professionalised research organisations and private-sector consultancies. This makes the technical exercise of benchmarking complicated while throwing up deeper questions about who we are serving and who we should be comparing ourselves against.
For all of these reasons, we started the process by defining what values and principles should guide the Policy. Through detailed consultations, we settled on the following nine principles:
- Value-based compensation: The IEJ’s remuneration policy must align with the organisation’s values and mission.
- Fairness and equity: The IEJ’s remuneration policy must be fair and equitable for all employees regardless of their gender, race, religion, or any other personal characteristic.
- Transparency: The IEJ will ensure that its remuneration policy is transparent, communicated to all employees, and available to the public. This includes providing clear guidelines for how salaries are determined and how performance evaluations are conducted. This will include disclosure of salary bands but not individual employees’ salaries.
- Diversity, equity and inclusion: The IEJ’s remuneration policy must promote diversity, equity, and inclusion within the organisation, ensuring the attainment of a staff complement that gives expression to those values.
- Addressing historic inequities: The IEJ’s remuneration policy must take proactive measures to address historic inequities and injustices along race and gender lines, including considering the broader financial obligations of historically disadvantaged persons within their extended family networks.
- Competitiveness: The IEJ must achieve and maintain competitive salary bands in line with comparator organisations. This must be done in a manner that balances market competitiveness and pay equity, pays fair wages and attracts and retains skilled employees, including those from historically disadvantaged groups.
- Reducing pay inequality: The IEJ’s remuneration policy should include measures to limit pay gaps across salary bands, such as, maintaining a reasonable and transparent pay ratio between senior and junior staff.
- Periodic review: The IEJ’s remuneration policy should be periodically reviewed to ensure that it remains fair and appropriate. This should include benchmarking salary bands against relevant peer organisations.
- Employee involvement: The IEJ’s remuneration policy should be developed and updated with the participation of the IEJ’s staff.
Only after that, did we proceed to the more technical components of benchmarking, job grading, and salary setting. The end result, summarising the complexity that appears in this document, are salary scales that compare fairly against our more professionalised peers but are capped at the upper end to avoid excessively high salaries for top senior management. This means IEJ salaries likely significantly exceed those of some comrades we work with in movement environments, while likely being too low to attract some away from higher-paying government or private-sector jobs. We hope to have found fair and viable salary levels congruent with our values.
We wanted our process followed and this Policy, including the salary ranges contained, to be public. Prospective applicants for IEJ jobs should know what they may earn before applying. Current staff should understand how their own salary package fits within the organisation. And we hope our peers will offer us useful feedback from which we can learn.
I am proud that this Policy represents a sincere and inclusive attempt to grapple with a highly charged issue in a transparent and values-driven way. The IEJ team is stronger as a result of this process.
Amaarah is a Junior Programme Officer in the Rethinking Economics for Africa project. She is currently studying towards her Masters in Applied Development Economics at Wits University. 
Dr James Musonda is the Senior Researcher on the Just Energy Transition at the IEJ. He is also the Principal Investigator for the Just Energy Transition: Localisation, Decent Work, SMMEs, and Sustainable Livelihoods project, covering South Africa, Ghana, and Kenya.
Dr Basani Baloyi is a Co-Programme Director at the IEJ. She is a feminist, development economist and activist. She gained her research experience while working on industrial policy issues in academia, at the Centre For Competition, Regulation and Economic Development (CCRED) and Corporate Strategy and Industrial Development (CSID) Unit.
Dr Andrew Bennie is Senior Researcher in Climate Policy and Food Systems at the IEJ. He has extensive background in academic and civil society research, organising, and activism. Andrew has an MA in Development and Environmental Sociology, and a PhD in Sociology on food politics, the agrarian question, and collective action in South Africa, both from the University of the Witwatersrand.
Juhi holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in International Relations and Sociology from Wits University and an Honours degree in Development Studies from the University of Cape Town. Her current research focus is on social care regimes in the South African context, with a particular focus on state responses to Early Childhood Development and Long-Term Care for older persons during the COVID-19 pandemic. Her other research areas include feminist economics, worlds of work and the care economy.
Bandile Ngidi is the Programme Officer for Rethinking Economics for Africa. Bandile has previously worked at the National Minimum Wage Research Initiative and Oxfam South Africa. He holds a Masters in Development Theory and Policy from Wits University. He joined the IEJ in August 2018. Bandile is currently working on incubating the Rethinking Economics for Africa movement (working with students, academics and broader civil society). 
Liso Mdutyana has a BCom in Philosophy and Economics, an Honours in Applied Development Economics, and a Masters in Applied Development Economics from Wits University. His areas of interest include political economy, labour markets, technology and work, and industrial policy. Through his work Liso aims to show the possibility and necessity of economic development that prioritises human wellbeing for everyone.
Joan Stott holds a Bachelor of Business Science in Economics and a Master’s in Economics from Rhodes University. She brings to the IEJ a wealth of experience in public finance management, policy development, institutional capacity-building, and advancing socioeconomic and fiscal justice.
Siyanda Baduza is a Junior Basic Income Researcher at IEJ. He holds a BSc in Economics and Mathematics, an Honours degree in Applied Development Economics, and is currently completing a Master’s degree in Applied Development Economics at the University of the Witwatersrand. Siyanda’s research focuses on the impacts of social grants on wellbeing, with a particular focus on the gendered dynamics of this impact. His interests include applied micro-economics, policy impact evaluation, labour markets, gender economics, and political economy. He is passionate about translating economic research into impactful policy.
Shikwane is a Junior Programme Officer at IEJ focusing on civil society support and global governance in the G20. He has a background in legal compliance, IT contracting and student activism. He holds degrees in Political Studies and International Relations, as well as an LLB, from the University of the Witwatersrand.
Dr Tsega is a Senior Researcher focusing on Women’s Economic Empowerment within the G20. She examines gender equity in economic policy, with expertise in food systems and small enterprise development. She holds a PhD in development studies from the University of the Western Cape, an MA in Development Economics, and degrees in Development Studies and Economics from UNISA and Addis Ababa University.
Nerissa is a G20 Junior Researcher at IEJ, focusing on advancing civil society priorities within the G20 framework. She bridges data, research, and policy to advance inclusive economic frameworks. She is completing a Master’s in Data Science (e-Science) at the University of the Witwatersrand, and holds Honours and Bachelor’s Degrees in International Relations with distinction. She has worked as a Research Fellow at SAIIA and a Visiting Research Fellow at Ipea in Brazil.
Dr Mzwanele is a Senior Researcher supporting South Africa’s G20 Sherpa with policy research. He holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Birmingham and an MSc from the University of the Witwatersrand. His work covers open macroeconomics, trade, finance, and higher education policy, and he has published widely on inequality, unemployment, household debt and higher education curriculum reform.
Kamal is the Project Lead for IEJ’s G20 work, focusing on sovereign debt and development finance. He holds a BComm (Hons) in Applied Development Economics from the University of the Witwatersrand and an Erasmus Mundus Joint Masters in Economic Policies for the Global Transition. He has worked with SCIS, UNCTAD and co-founded Rethinking Economics for Africa.