Stripe clawed back pension contributions after staff cuts | Hacker News Reader

Stripe clawed back pension contributions after staff cuts

businesspost.ie

196 pointsvdddv137 comments

(I work at Stripe and live in Ireland.) This article is written about Irish pension schemes. The mechanic that the article is talking about is standard practice in Ireland. And, in particular, it only applies to contributions by Stripe for employees who have worked less than two years.

Framing it as "clawing back" pension contributions is disingenuous (IMO). Stripe applied its stated pension plan policy. It would have been news if Stripe had deviated from its policy.

No it's not standard practice. It's done in some companies but not that many. For those firms that do this, most waive it for redundancies.

In all four large tech companies I've worked for, and my father's factory job, this is the up front stated policy on pension contributions.

I've worked in a few places with similar policies. Lots of companies will match your 401k contributions (up to a limit), but the matching funds have a "vesting" period (typically a year or two). Stock options are often offered under similar terms.

I don't see any reason for this article to exist other than to try to "shame" Stripe for doing what many other companies also do.

I’m not familiar with the Irish system but why is it standard practice to claw back contributions for people? What is the reason for enabling and doing this?

Their tax-exempt status is conditional on the pension fund being in action for at least two years. If they're given to you without that, they're no longer tax-exempt pension contributions but employee income which has tax implications for both employee and employer.

Yikes, that seems pretty horrendous law. In the the UK the tax exempt status comes from the fact you're locking away the income for, say, decades; and you'll be liable to normal income tax at the point of withdrawal.

It's designed to encourage people to save money into their pensions, to make up for decades of the government underfunding social security pensions. It seems really shitty to make that tax break conditional on job security.

Designed is a really strong word. The tax free nature of pension contributions come from the near impossibility of otherwise sensibly taxing annuities.

How should a post tax annuity be calculated? The simplest annuities can probably be done (e.g. pay 100k and receive 6k a year til you die). But, if you paid tax on the full 6k that would mean that the 100k was being taxed again. However, tax none of it and that would see no tax on interest because it was being paid through an annuity. That's before one even starts thinking about spousal benefits or inflation linking.

You get into some funny (and seemingly unfair) rules once tax exemption is involved. It's why you have limited rollover of unused FSA funds in the US--and the ability to rollover at all is relatively recent.

And yet HSA funds are the most tax advantaged of all. No tax going in, can be invested in anything that can be bought via Fidelity, and no tax coming out, if used for healthcare expenses at any point in your life, even for your dependents.

No one said laws have to be consistent :-)

This is normal in the USA as well. Most traditional (non-FAANG-adjacent) companies have 1-6 year vesting periods for employer contributions.

Also places with real pensions have similar vestment periods for the pensions, leave before then and you typically get your contributions back but certainly not the employer’s. Though those are rare outside government work in the US anymore.

I have had many jobs with no vesting in my employee match. Heck for my company I own, I follow the “default” path from guideline 401k, and my match to my employees vests immediately.

(But yes also had 1-2 jobs that the match had a vesting period)

I've never encountered a vesting schedule for employer contributions myself, but I've always been aware of their existence. I think one company I joined had 12-18 month vesting schedule that they'd just recently gotten rid of.

I wonder if it's more common outside of tech?

Definitely more common outside of tech. It looks like 72% of 401(k) plans have a vesting period, with the most common durations being 3 or 5 years. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/17/most-workers-wait-years-for-...

Amazon clawed back 401k contributions if you left before 2 years..I can't remember the exact timeframe.

Its not a claw back per-se. Under the Irish pensions laws an employee does not have the right to retain the employers contributions to a pension if they leave the position with the company within the first 2 years of contributions to the pension (does not mean 2 years of service. If you have a 6 month probation for example, the employer will not contribute for that time. The period is 2 years from the first employers contribution). Any employee contribution is fully retained by the employee. In this case, because they are being made redundant, the employers share of the pension is refunded (through no fault of the employee).

Do you work in PR?

lol this is flagged (and I can't seem to vouch) but the parent is a PR employee of Stripe and didn't disclose that until challenged.

Perhaps it's worth disclosing you're on the company's PR / Comms team and run the @Stripe Twitter account?

Why? The comment says they work at Stripe and live in Ireland, and they're just relaying factual information.

This is why I'm so wary of "tech press" news like this. Having a vesting schedule for employer contributions is pretty standard for a lot of countries, not just Ireland. So this has been going on for literally decades, all across the world, but it's only when a tech company does it that it is framed as "clawing back pension contributions".

I'm not saying this doesn't suck for employees or shouldn't be legally changed, but why are people OK with this practice for literally decades until a tech unicorn does it?

Disclosures aren't about whether or not the statement is meant to be actually factual, the whole story, and moral it's about giving people the information they need to weigh when they consider if that's the case. It's reasonable to say a PR employee's response has a high likelihood of being more biased than a generic Stripe employee's response, or at least biased in a different direction. Again that doesn't mean the response is actually "wrong" or just a partial picture or what have you but it does mean many people appreciate considering the possibility of bias when trying to come to a full conclusion.

I think expectation is that tech companies will be nicer. Pretty sure this comes from the belief that tech workers are unusually talented or rare, and so the worker-company relationship is more like a doctor or classical engineer, less like a factory worker or technician (Not that doctors and other professionals are treated with great respect anymore — it is just a matter of perceptions, people haven’t updated their viewpoints for the current brutally mercenary environment). So, these stories tend to float to the top.

It should be a story with real consequences for the company if anybody’s pension is yanked.

Because they took the time to disclose the parts of their situation that supported the point they wanted to make (work at stripe, live in Ireland), but disregarded the parts they knew would discredit them a bit (PR for the company). Also, coming to their defense from a throw-away is a curious choice.

> Also, coming to their defense from a throw-away is a curious choice.

Yes, it's all a mass conspiracy!! https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=hn_throwaway_99

Fair enough, I should have looked before I added the snark - upvoted cause fun response. But the rest of my comment stands, I do think they selectively disclosed and working in PR would know they were doing so.

I'm all for disclosure and do so myself when commenting on things related to my company.

But...I'm curious what level of disclosure you feel is required beyond saying you work at the company? Personally I don't want to read a bunch of legalese on HN posts. There are enough critical minds here that chicanery gets ferreted out pretty quickly. In this case, there are also multiple posts from others saying that Stripe's practice is if not ubiquitous at least common in Ireland, hence unsurprising to those who work there.

edit: typo

I think generally you should disclose a. if you work at the company and b. if you are related to a project at the company being discussed.

If you are a professional PR/spin person for the company, you should definitely disclose.

You might have seen me on HN threads before. I've been at Stripe for ~four years and I'm happy to disclose that I work here.

If you're curious as to what I work on, I work on product updates via Stripe's owned channels, user issues, and other community-related efforts. I'm always contactable here (hnusername@stripe.com) or on Twitter (linked in my bio).

I'm also very happy to correct the record when misleading articles (or articles without necessary context) are published by the media.

Speaking plainly and truthfully about issues like this is critical to earn trust so "spinning" news would be contrary to everything I work so hard on.

This sub thread isn't about disclosing _whether_ you work there, rather, your job there. You answered the parent's "a" but ignored the "b".

Your LinkedIn, in stark contrast to your profile and your comment, says Communications Manager and "I lead community communications in EMEA. You can call it marketing".

My comment above reflects exactly what I work on at Stripe.

My role has a general title of Communications Manager (we have a ~flat structure and our roles aren't particularly descriptive). This role sits within the Comms team at Stripe.

The majority of my time is spent telling the stories of businesses that build on Stripe (and helping users). In other companies, this is often called marketing or just "comms".

Things can be news to people even if they've been stated in a legal document somewhere.

Not only it is legal, it is also a standard practice where everyone else is doing it.

It is odd that Stripe is the only one who is criticized for it...

The first tip off this was not in the US was the word "pension" which has long gone the way of the dodo bird in the US.

It is about a small number of employees in Ireland. Maybe "Ireland" should be added to the title?

In the U.S. (I'm not familar with Ireland), vested benefits, whether defined or contributed, cannot be "clawed back". But unvested ones can, that's what "unvested" means.

Helpful information because as someone in the US I assumed the idea of a pension (outside of government jobs) had all but disappeared.

These won't be "defined benefit" schemes but defined contribution schemes much more akin to your 401(k)

In the UK (and I assume Ireland), the term pension is used for more than just defined benefit pensions.

Correct, most pensions in Ireland (these days) are defined contribution. Even within the civil service / government roles it is becoming extremely rare to see defined benefit schemes.

This sounds exactly like the equivalent of unvested matching.

I think it should not be added. There are so many US-only news and we’re not adding the “in USA”.

Please do not assume default = USA.

The default assumption on this USA based site run by a USA based company is "USA" unless otherwise stated.

Then it should be news.ycombinator.us

.com is an global domain.

“[.com] was originally administered by the United States Department of Defense … and remains under ultimate jurisdiction of U.S. law“

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.com

That hardly seems relevant? Literally all TLDs are ultimately under US jurisdiction, given that the ICANN is under US jurisdiction.

US government built it, a US company runs it, and US law applies to it.

It’s silly to complain that US companies and US-focused sites shouldn’t use it.

>US government built it, a US company runs it, and US law applies to it.

All also true of .ie and .fr and .eu and whatever other TLDs you might want to choose.

>It’s silly to complain that US companies and US-focused sites shouldn’t use it.

Nobody complained about that.

Your first paragraph signals US is the default.

I discovered today that stripe is half based in Ireland. It would add valuable context to say which of its two countries this story refers to, since it involves country specific pension setups.

Regrettably, due to USA's brand of capitalism, these days, the word pension means it's probably not a USA thing.

There are pros and cons to defined benefit (i.e. pension in US speak) and defined contribution (e.g. 401-k) plans. Among other things, defined benefit plans--when they were more common--were mostly oriented around people staying at the same company for a decade or more. Usually if you just stayed for 2-3 years you got nothing or almost nothing.

There is almost no value to paying someone else to manage your retirement funds when you can do the same thing they do for 0.03% to 0.08% expense ratios with a target date retirement fund from vanguard/Schwab/fidelity or mix and match the various broad market stock/bond funds.

There often seems to be an implicit assumption that the money funding defined benefit contributions came from a magic money tree somewhere (or at least did so until it turned out that the tree wasn't producing enough).

I know in the years that I was earning into a deferred benefit plan, I barely gave it a passing thought. And, had you asked me if I would prefer cash or for the equivalent to be funneled into some opaque benefits system that would hopefully pay out someday, I'm pretty sure what I would have chosen.

Are some people better with defined benefits? Almost certainly. But at some point you're being pretty paternalistic to say you should much less must take that option.

There was a time where it was expected, and then it was taken away. Now, we are all slaves to the broader market with no guarantees, where once we had guarantees.

And coincidentally, wealth inequality is unrivaled in modern times.

Nothing is keeping you from putting some portion of your salary into long-term low-risk bonds or even into annuities of various types. Your total compensation is presumably the same (given tax effects) so you're basically saying that you'd rather an employer handle some portion of your savings for you than handling it yourself. And there have certainly been defined-benefit failures and reductions of various kinds so there were pretty much never any guarantees.

Again, you seem to be assuming that there was some special pool of money that went into defined benefits that got pulled back. Which isn't true. Companies pay what they need to hire including benefits packages.

Except back then pensions were tied to the company you worked for, and were guaranteed. 401k funds are not guaranteed.

Assuming the company existed, and was not corrupt in handling all that money. But there is a lot of volatility in a company existing for 50+ years in the future, and there is a lot of corruption.

Hence the tightening of DB pension funding and investment rules (PPA 2006), culminating in non taxpayer funded DB pensions being untenable expensive.

401k funds are as guaranteed as any defined benefit pension. They both get invested into SP500 index funds, and they both get bailed out just the same by the federal government. If the stock market tanks, the DB pension is going down just like any 401k.

A 401k is not a pension! The nitpick about how much the manager shows how much you've been fooled. Elsewhere, a pension is a government guaranteed faucet of money for retirement.

Depends on the locality. In the UK, they refer to something similar to 401k as a pension also. The long form would be “defined benefit pension” or “defined contribution pension”.

In the former, you are promised (defined) how much you will get in your retirement, in the latter, you are promised how much will be contributed to your retirement savings (but not how much you will get).

> The nitpick about how much the manager shows how much you've been fooled.

I do not know what this is referring to.

>Elsewhere, a pension is a government guaranteed faucet of money for retirement.

The US has that too, called social security.

> The nitpick about how much the manager shows how much you've been fooled.

This was me, letting my opinions get the better of me.

Having to optimize the fees on your 401k is the fiscally responsible thing to do, under the system as it exists, but the fact that social security isn't enough to properly live off of is horseshit.

“Default” and “status quo” aren’t the same.

Also, this publication is from the Business Post, which is based in Dublin (domain being “businesspost.ie” is clear about this point, and it’s already next to the title). That seems enough of a hint to me that this news might have Irish components.

You just argued why you should be the country in the title but then somehow came to the wrong conclusion

I just have realistic expectations what I can achieve in this calm Sunday evening.

The news is really specific to Ireland due to Irish tax laws.

Why shouldn't this very relevant context be in the title?

Stripe is doing it despite not having to. Where it's happening is irrelevant.

USA has it too. Amazon Software Engineers can't keep their 401K company match if they leave the company before completing 3 years of service.

Thanks for the suggestion. I did not add it because of HN guidelines: "please use the original title" https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Disclaimer: I work at Stripe in Ireland.

This article is completely misleading.

In Ireland, if you leave your employment before the 2 year mark, you can lose your employers' contributions. Not the ones you have voluntarily put in.

This is pretty standard here (at least as far as tech companies go). It's literally written in the freaking contract.

It sucks, but we all read our contracts when we signed.

The reason I can see an employer doing this is to serve as a retention mechanism. But it obviously doesn't work when people get laid off.

the fact it is being done to people who are being laid off shows it's not just a retention mechanism

Your comment makes it seem like the article is pretty accurate then? Like they are clawing back the contributions, but you're saying it's okay because their contract allows them to do it. I'm not sure how this makes the article misleading.

Of course it's okay to follow a legally binding contract.

If you got a mortgage when interest rates were low and now the bank comes knocking at your door to get you to pay more that wouldn't be reasonable.

There's always a risk. The problem is a half-ass article that tries to portray a company as being bad for following the agreement we as employees accept to work there.

Legality and morality are different things- as is marketing and recruiting. This is why a lot of companies wave vesting periods during layoffs. Eventually the market will move in the other direction and the companies that treat their staff better during this time will have an easier time rehiring.

This isn’t that different from US 401k vesting.

Like Amazon has a 3 year vesting period for 401k matches. If you leave before then, you lose all the matched funds but keep your direct contributions.

Not sure why this is news other than trying ride the “big tech bad” viewpoint.

Amazon takes back all 401k matching if you leave before three years? That is very different from my experience at large tech companies.

Edit: just looked it up and it is three years. Brutal. https://www.amazon.jobs/cs/landing_pages/benefitsoverview-us

Yeah, Amazon has the worst benefits for big tech. They started “considering” improving things before the economy was going down but seems like all that stopped.

It’s more in line with “traditional” companies. Amazon is going more down the IBM route everyday. For any Amazonians, it’s day 2.

Damn, i guess that’s another reason to avoid working at Amazon. That is ridiculous.

Quit vs laid off seems like a reasonable thing to push back on in that contract, wonder if they’d be open to that sort of thing.

I agree with you, but I don't if it would make much of a difference.

IMO the best solution (from an employee protection PoV) would be for Ireland to ban these clauses. But I doubt all of the tech companies that actually bring money to this country would be happy with that. It's already a small country with a tiny talent pool. Most companies are just here due to the low corporate tax. If the government starts tightening things with regulation I have no idea why companies would stay here. The country has nothing to offer.

Perhaps a bit off topic, but there must be some way to act as sort of a go-between for the US and EU, right? I mean you are going to have to put up with the sort of awkward automatic enthusiasm of Americans anyway, may as well take advantage of it!

In Ireland there is quite a few companies that have waived this type of clause when they are doing redundancies. Let's not say the company didn't have a choice

If some one leaves the company or is fired for cause, claw back the contributions. If the company "makes them redundant", claw back is nasty and immoral. People joined the company with a fair expectation that they would get benefits. It's cheating to do this.

I now consider Stripe to be a gonif company.

Your first sentence does not make much sense to me. If somebody leaves your company for any reason, they should get to keep everything they earned to date.

I classify compensation that has not yet vested as not yet earned.

That is correct, then the article should also mention it.

> The pension clawbacks, which are legally permitted under Irish pension rules, only applied to staff who had been working with the company for less than two years.

Legally permitted doesn't really mean anything when talking about ethics or morals.

I’m not familiar with Irish pensions, but in general if the benefit has a vesting schedule that means you earn it over time. If you leave the company for any reason you get to keep the part that’s vested, and not the remaining unvested part.

That's where you should be super explicit about it.

The Tech industry is very cyclical. In two years Stripe, and other companies that handled redundancies badly, will be asking themselves why they struggle to recruit top talent.

Unfortunately this is almost never true because of the endless supply for desperate, gullible or just arrogant people who are ready to work for top tech companies.

I’m not sure your statement and the parent comment are in conflict. What percentage of “ desperate, gullible or just arrogant people” are top talent?

Dunno about exact numbers but there were some HN commenters when the layoffs started 2022 writing about "cutting fat" and "low performers" who thinks layoffs happens to others and not them I guess and that their bosses know who the lowperformers are.

There are genuine low performers, however, based on my personal experience, they generally only constitute 25% of the people laid off for low performance. If management has overinflated expectations of your project, you will be a "low performer". If you happen to do badly on a project with high visibility to senior management, you will be perceived to be a low performer too, even if your delivery on other projects was brilliant. If your last project failed, often because of external factors, you will be deemed to be a low performer.

My favorite ranking dysfunction is that people who do the bear share of work or the hardest work also cause the most problems (bugs, rereleases etc), making them look bad if the judge have no clue how much they have done or how hard the task were.

People repeating that stuff are true believers. The reality is that the politics of companies is complex.

I can think of people I know is big tech companies who were nearly fired. One guy ended up serving out a purgatory sentence as a CE because his boss got whacked. A year later, he’s an SVP when a friend of the old boss took over.

Ditto the opposite. A friend in a bank collects low performers purposefully to protect his core teams. He dutifully offers some cannon fodder up when the company demands tribute to the volcano gods.

I have observed this from the hiring side. Often the approach is to drop standards. This can result in problems for existing staff, who have to pick up the pieces. As a result they are also more likely to leave.

Stripe handled the layoffs incredibly well, in my opinion as someone who was laid off.

The package was more generous than it had to be. The founders took responsibility and were transparent about the business. It was handled reasonably.

I would work at Stripe again.

They founders took responsibility and cut their salary so you could stay? They said they took responsibility took the credit for tough choices and fired you. Now you have 16 weeks / 4 months to get another position when no one is hiring and interviews take 2 months on average before the offer is pulled.

Depending on employees age, length of employment 16 weeks can be an extremely low amount and the courts could get a higher settlement.

What country are we talking about? The US does not offer any guarantee for severance.

If we are talking Ireland, as others have said the law appears to be exactly this.

1. I don’t know what their salary is but I think it’s like a dollar.

2. They talked through their decision making process in hiring at the rate Stripe did, then what changed that made them do layoffs. They were very direct that this was their choices and they owned them.

I don’t need them to weirdly punish themselves. They made a bet. They were wrong about the future. That’s fine.

I got 14 weeks which is a really long time.

How did the founders take responsibility?

They did an all-hands the day of the layoffs with everyone being let go. They walked through why they'd hired so quickly, the new information (both macro-economic and within Stripe) that caused them to reconsider, and where that led. They emphasized that this was their decision: they set the course for hiring at the rate at in the places that Stripe did over the prior ~18 months; they were the ones who decided on the layoffs.

Shit happens. They made a bet based on the information that they had at the time (in this case that COVID moving commerce hugely online would be a permanent shift, when it wasn't (or at least not as large.)) They mis-predicted the future and then had to respond.

I understand why they made the bet they did (and mostly agree.) I understand why they then decided to do layoffs (and mostly agree.)

They didn't blame anyone else or try to sidestep the difficult conversations.

Every company pension in Ireland has this as standard, it’s from the pension provider. Hilariously, the Business Post pension provider will have it too. You can’t clawback something that people never had. It’s also good for the employee as if you’re out (voluntarily or otherwise) within 2 years you can get your own contributions back out vs locked in a tiny fund. On one hand they got the redundancy package that far surpassed statutory, and then on the other they’re looking for something that they were never entitled to. Seems a small bit strange that we’d cry a river for well paid tech workers “losing” a small amount of money versus what they’d have gotten out of the process. There’s other people we should be looking out and fighting for.

I mean, just because someone is well paid doesn't mean they deserve to have money taken from them?

Every company has this as standard, but a lot have waived it for redundancies, so let's not let stripe off the hook.

Just a clarification. If they were in the role for less than 2 years there is no legal reason to provide a redundancy package (statutory redundancy). The fact that employees are getting a payment even if they were there less than 2 years should show that Stripe are not "clawing back" contributions but that the refund is due to a stadard mechanism within the pension scheme.

https://www.citizensinformation.ie/en/employment/unemploymen...

Is this article talking about 401k in the the US? If so, it’s fairly common for a 401k match to vest over two years.

It’s fairly common, but also insane in a world where the average tenure at a company is a few years. Basically a way to say you contribute to a 401K without actually contributing anything.

It’s a way potential employees will understand as devaluing the benefit. Basically making it likely a pointless inducement to join. About 50/50 of the companies I joined offered 401k matching vested immediately.

The first company I worked for started offering a 401k about 1 year into my employment there. I remember seeing the low percentage match and 2-year vesting schedule as kind a bit of cheap-skate middlefinger, and declined the benefit. Probably did more harm than good to offer it.

2-5% match is pretty good imho. Any match percentage is basically doubling your savings. If the vesting is good, save up the the limit of match. With tech industry salaries higher 401k matches would just hit the max limit for 401k frequently. The vesting time is the cheap thing. Though once for me, the vesting was still valid if you left the company - it was just delayed.

Sounds like it could be viewed as a small incentive to stay, which given the short average tenure is probably a good thing. High churn rate is not generally a good thing for businesses or products regardless of the individual benefits.

Amazon does this. Most other tech companies do not (eg pretty much any other FAANG).

Nor any other non-FAANG company I've ever worked for. In my experience, 401k matches are immediate.

EMC had a three year 401k match vest schedule in the 2010s. I think they’re on immediate like everyone else now, but don’t remember.

This article (citing a registration-wall report) says only 28% of employees offer immediate vesting on employer matches.

https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2021/06/17/most-workers-wait-years-...

It is about a small number of employees in Ireland. Maybe "Ireland" should be added to the title? (copied from my other reply)

From the article:

> Stripe cut around 90 jobs from its Dublin office as part of a wider restructuring of its global operations, which saw it reduce its overall workforce by 14 per cent from 8,000 employees down to around 7,000 today.

> The pension clawbacks, which are legally permitted under Irish pension rules, only applied to staff who had been working with the company for less than two years.

My first job out of college in 2000 had a two year vesting schedule. Every job since then has been immediate vesting, though one did wait until 90 day after starting work before matching started. Two year cliff vesting probably still exists but ends up not saving the company a whole lot compared to the bad impression it gives to potential employee candidates.

Ok, so the way Irish pensions work (which is the topic here):

1. You may put an age related maximum percentage of your income into the pension fund (10% up to 30 years, 5% increase every 5 years thereafter). This is invested by a registered pension fund on your behalf. It is exempt from capital gains tax, deemed disposal on index funds, or other types of taxes that normally apply to investments.

2. Your employer may match an amount up to your contribution. Most employers in the tech sector will offer between matching the first 5% to first 10%. While this is income from your employer, to you, it is not considered for income tax purposes.

3. You are normally not allowed withdraw any of this prior to age 50.

4. _However_, if you leave a job with an employer managed pension within 2 years, you can instead refund your entire contributions and either keep them or invest them in your new pension scheme. This is to avoid people having to manage N number of pension schemes from however many former employers. If you choose to do this however, the tax-free status of the employer contributions vanishes. So they get refunded to your employer, and if your employer wanted to give them direct to you, that would be taxable income. Most employers won't want to bother with the paperwork for this.

5. When you draw down your pension, you may pay income tax on the payouts if your pension payouts exceed the tax-free cutoff.

> if you leave a job with an employer managed pension within 2 years, you can instead refund your entire contributions and either keep them or invest them in your new pension scheme

What happens if you leave in 3 years? Is it a 2-year window that vests or once vested forever vested?

For N > 2 years, everything in the fund is tax-exempt (even funds contributed less than 2 years ago), but you no longer get the option to refund your contributions to cash when moving, you need to wait until you're 50 to start withdrawals.

Is this legal? Is there no trade union negotiation either?

From the article:

> The pension clawbacks, which are legally permitted under Irish pension rules, only applied to staff who had been working with the company for less than two years.

Most industries in Ireland are pretty unionised, but tech is one of the exceptions here.

Not only it is legal, it is also a standard practice. Everyone is doing it.

There is an argument where Stripe should have gone above and beyond. But maybe Google/apple/ Microsoft who are 100x richer (maybe) than Stripe should have spearheaded that first.

Stripe has pension?

This is an Irish article, the system is different over there.

They were being applauded a few months ago as to how to make people redundant. As if there's a good way. It was just a cheap shot at Musk.

It would be the equivalent of a US company clawing back a 401k contribution match, which is kind of crappy imo, especially if after a year.

It would be the equivalent of a U.S. company clawing back a not yet vested 401k contribution, which can happen. It is the whole point of vesting.

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