“We all have to commit to making this right and then follow through on that commitment.”

The concept of pay equity affects all co-ops, no matter who their general manager (GM) is. The ability of our stores to attract, train, and retain quality candidates creates a rising tide for all co-ops, especially as Principle 6 mandates our collective cooperation. Columinate’s Compensation Database is a remarkably helpful tool that enables general managers and boards to understand how their compensation package compares to similar stores throughout the country.  

General Manager LeAnna Nieratko of the Erie Food Co-op in Erie, Pennsylvania was able to utilize the compensation database in her own compensation conversations with her board. “I use the data to justify my wage request in my yearly RFP. I used this generally along with Labor Bureau statistics for my position and area.”

Originally, however, Nieratko was hesitant to ask for a larger compensation package. The 2021 presentation by Columinate consultant Carolee Colter about gender pay equity was eye-opening for her board and opened a conversation about the disparity.

“I set the low bar for female pay in my size group when I first spoke to Carolee Colter about this. I wasn’t comfortable asking for ‘too much.’ I didn’t want to risk giving board members a negative impression of me, since job security was more valuable to me than the wage. This fear was based in real-world experiences dealing with overt sexism at my board meetings.”

Needed: continuing education and frank conversations

Having gone through this process with her board, Nieratko recommends continuing education and frank, open conversations about gender, compensation, and position expectations. “A challenge for co-ops is that boards are ever-changing, so maintaining that conversation over-time, even if our co-op is maintaining an equitable GM pay, will help prevent the old problems from creeping in. GMs should also explicitly state where they fall in this data set as a part of their compensation process. The database is crucial and made possible by co-ops sharing their data, so everyone benefits when there is an expectation that a co-op submits and utilizes the data on a regular basis.”

General Manager Melinda Schab of the Moscow Food Co-op in Moscow, Idaho echoes that last point. “I would like to see board presidents insist that the information from the database be utilized during any pay negotiations. I would also like to see 100 percent GM participation in the database.”

Schab has also been able to personally use help from Colter and the information in the database during pay conversations with her board. “Over the years I’ve pulled comparison data from the database to show the board the pay range for GMs in similar-sized co-ops. This most recent time, I enlisted Carolee’s help with the data because I was looking for more than just the median wage and the range. I also wanted to look at the length of time as a GM and gender.”

It can be hard for food co-ops that value equity and think of themselves as progressive to confront a generally similar level of gender wage gap as the rest of society. Despite progress between 2021 and 2024, more intentionality must be brought to this issue.

“I think part of the reason has to do with the way women are socialized in our culture,” explains Schab. “It is still uncomfortable to talk about my own pay, and it is difficult to ask for a pay increase—even at the board’s request. In our broader society, work done by women is often valued less than the same work done by men. At our board retreat last fall, we had a guest speaker who shared that it will take another 260 years for women to earn equal pay at our current rate of change. That’s embarrassing and completely unacceptable. We all have to commit to making this right and then follow through on that commitment.”

Still a great deal of work to be done 

Both Schab and Nieratko see board education as a crucial step in helping to combat this endemic issue. Boards, especially those with regular elections and rotating members, are not inherently HR experts. Having processes built in to evaluate a GM’s compensation, as well as understanding pay equity across the organization, is imperative. Nieratko suggested that boards build standard questions into an RFP about where the proposed compensation falls among similarly sized stores.

“Ensure the board committee reviewing compensation has resources and is comfortable asking questions of the GM or other professionals (for some co-ops this may be a board consultant). This includes challenging GMs whose compensation requests come in too low and therefore run against the vision of the co-op as an employer who pays equitably.”

Data is often most useful when it can help challenge our assumptions about ourselves and tell us not who we’d like to think we are, but who we are. Gender pay equity data in co-ops shows that there is still a great deal of work to be done, but raising awareness among key decision-makers is a key first step. In that way, a robustly populated compensation database is a tremendous tool both for learning and for improvement.

Read Carolee Colter’s 2024 comprehensive update to the database: Click here