We’ve put this page on our website to invite comments and feedback and
to help self employed contractors work out what they should be charging.
Please use the form at the bottom of the page to make your comments.
We feel there is a need for discussion about pay rates for the self employed. The high inflation associated with the cost of living crisis has reduced real time wage value. From anecdotal information, it seems that self employed rates have not kept up with employed pay. Partly the reason for this is the difficulty in comparing the two. Employees have a number of benefits which are not available to self employed people, like sick pay, holiday pay and employer pension contributions. They also have a number of costs, which employed people don’t have. We wanted to compare our rates to an employed wage, so we made the spreadsheet below. By putting your hourly rate, how many hours you work, the cost of the equipment you use for work and a few other details into the spreadsheet, it’ll tell you what your equivalent hourly wage is.
Click on the Download button to download the spreadsheet.
We recently went to the Woody Gathering organised by the Land Workers Alliance. There was a discussion there about forestry pay and we agreed to share the spreadsheet with other forestry contractors. We’re interested more widely in whether people are receiving the pay that they deserve. There’s a form at the bottom of the page where you can give some feedback on the spreadsheet and information about your pay rates. It’s useful to have names and email addresses because this allows us to verify the data, but if you’d prefer to remain anonymous, that’s fine.
Factors that can reasonably affect expected pay
Short term vs long term contracts – Lots of short term contracts generate more admin time and unpaid time, such as pricing the job up etc. If someone only wants to employ you for a day, it’s fair that they pay a higher hourly rate than someone who will employ you for a longer period of time.
Training potential – If work comes with training or valuable experience, it’s fair enough for it to pay a little less. Apprenticeships pay less than normal jobs. For this to be the case, the learning experience has to be of real value. You might agree to do a job for less, if it will qualify you for work in the future. However, people shouldn’t accept a low wage just because they’re young. Young people have to eat and pay for housing like the rest of us.
Clients you like and work you enjoy – Just because you love your job, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be paid properly. However, there are jobs you might only do if they pay a premium and there might be clients you’ll only work for if it’s really financially lucrative. We should all be aiming to only do work we enjoy for people we like (or at least don’t dislike), so we should all set our lowest wage at a proper living wage rate.
How much we should expect to earn
The following figures are provided to put forestry wages into context:
The median full time wage in the UK (April 25) is £39,039 or £750.75 per week.
The minimum wage is £12.71 = £508.40 for 40 hours a week.
The Real Living Wage outside London, as defined by the Living Wage Foundation is £13.45 per hour, or £538 for a 40 hour week.
As forestry contractors, we should expect to earn well above the Real Living Wage, let alone the minimum wage. Minimum wage is just that, it’s a minimum. We’ve invested time in becoming experienced, money in equipment and time and money in training. We’re in an industry which involves risks. Where we minimise these risks, we do so because of our skills and experience. The spreadsheet which accompanies these notes accounts for depreciation, but we should not just expect to cover depreciation on the equipment we use. We should expect a return on the investment. A piece of equipment which only just covers its own costs is a poor investment. A forestry worker who is experienced and has invested in equipment should expect an hourly rate which is above the median national average.
Where to go from here
It would be good to get some data about current rates of pay and what people think would be a reasonable rate of pay in their situation. This could then inform a discussion about a possible minimum forestry rate, or a set of minimum rates for different circumstances and be fed into the discussion within the Land Workers Alliance.
The Spreadsheet
The spreadsheet which accompanies this is made to compare an hourly self employed rate with the equivalent pay for someone employed, who would receive sick pay, holiday pay and a pension.
The cells are either green, yellow or white. The green cells are there for you to enter data into. The yellow cells are changeable if you want to change them. The white cells are supposed to be left unchanged, so the formulas don’t get messed up.
There are four tabs:
Front Page: A summary of the comparison between employed and self employed rates.
Costs: Input your daily and annual costs here, to calculate how much they cost you for each hour worked.
Depreciation: You can ignore this page if you’re happy with depreciation being worked out as straight line depreciation over 5 years. You may prefer to depreciate some items (such as chainsaws) on a shorter basis, or items (Such as a shipping container) on a longer basis. If so, put them in the green boxes next to the number of years you wish to depreciate them over. You can put your own figure down for depreciation on this sheet if you’d prefer a different basis.
Assumptions: We’ve put in the average amount of holiday and sick pay workers in the UK get. We’ve also put in an average employer’s pension contribution. This allows a comparison allowing for these benefits which we don’t get as self employed people.
N.B. The Tories changed the name of the “minimum wage” to the “national living wage”, to muddy the waters when in the debate about proper payrates. If we refer to a living wage, we mean a wage which is high enough that you can reasonably live on it without subsidising it with benefits or other income.
Please put as much information as you are comfortable putting in on the form below.
Feel free to leave any section blank if you’d prefer not to say.
If you put an email address in, we may email you to validate your information or to follow up.
The more information we have, the more we can push for fair wages for contractors.