Two people can carry the same risk, hold the same knowledge, and answer for the same outcome, and still sit on terms that tell them their work is worth different amounts. We built that gap. We can close it.
This is the most uncomfortable conversation in our sector, for an honest reason: it touches what people are paid, what they are protected by, and what they can plan for. So it is worth being precise and structural about it, and careful not to reduce it to any one group or any one villain. The pattern is this. Across many operations, the people who hold the deepest local knowledge, who stay through the whole arc of a crisis, who carry the relationships that make the work possible, often sit on the terms with the least security and the least protection when things go wrong. Meanwhile the roles that rotate through carry terms that travel with them. The result is a workforce divided not by the value of the work but by the category of the contract.
Why the divide holds
The split is rarely anyone’s intent. It is the residue of how the system was assembled over decades, layer by reasonable layer. Different funding streams, different legal frameworks, different historical assumptions about who would be permanent and who would be temporary, all hardened into structures that now feel like facts of nature. Because the divide is structural, no single person can be blamed for it, and no single person can fix it alone. But a structure is exactly the kind of thing a sector can redesign, especially when the people who fund the work share an interest in a workforce that is stable, fair, and able to keep its hardest-won expertise.
The cost of leaving it unexamined is not only a fairness cost, though that alone would be enough. It is operational. When the people with the most context hold the least security, they are also the ones most likely to leave the moment a steadier option appears, taking irreplaceable knowledge with them. When terms signal that some staff are valued more than others doing comparable work, trust inside a team erodes in ways no policy on collaboration can repair. We pay for the divide in turnover, in lost knowledge, and in the quiet corrosion of teams that sense the inequity even when no one names it aloud.
When the people who hold the most context sit on the least security, we are not saving money. We are slowly exporting our own memory.
What structural fairness looks like
The fix is not a slogan about equality, and it is not pretending real differences in role do not exist. It is a deliberate redesign of the terms, and it can begin now.
Start by making the comparison visible. Map roles by what they actually require and carry, the responsibility, the risk, the expertise, rather than by the contract category they inherited. Where two roles demand comparable things, the terms should be able to explain themselves. A gap that cannot be justified by the work is one we built by habit, and naming it honestly is the first repair.
Protect the things money does not show. Equity is not only salary. It is security of tenure, duty of care that reaches everyone equally, the safety net when an operation closes or a crisis turns dangerous. Often the sharpest divide is not in the headline pay but in who is protected when the work ends or goes wrong. Closing that gap, so protection follows the risk a person actually carries, is some of the most important and least visible work available to us.
Build the path, not only the post. A workforce divided by category tends to trap people in it, with little route from one kind of role to another regardless of capability. Real fairness means building genuine progression, so the people who hold the deepest knowledge can rise on it rather than watch less experienced colleagues pass them by because of the contract they started on.
Fund the fairness with funders at the table. Much of the divide is inherited from how money is structured, so part of the redesign sits in the agreements themselves. This is a conversation to have alongside the people who fund the work, not against them, because a fairer and more stable workforce delivers better for the communities everyone is accountable to. The case is strongest made plainly: retention, continuity, and trust are not soft goods, they are the conditions for the work holding up.
None of this asks us to ignore that roles genuinely differ. It asks us to stop letting an inherited category, rather than the work itself, decide what a person’s contribution is worth and how well they are protected. That is a design choice, and we are the ones who can make a different one.
So here is the test worth holding ourselves to. Take two people who carry comparable risk and comparable responsibility, and look honestly at the terms they sit on. If the difference between them can only be explained by the category they were hired into, and not by the work they do, we have found a gap we built. The next step is not to defend it. It is to close one part of it, and to let the people who hold our deepest knowledge feel their work is finally valued as the work it is.