Reuters/Albert Gea
- Payments company Stripe is reportedly cutting pay for employees who move outside of Seattle, New York, or the Bay Area, but will also offer those employees $20,000 to relocate, according to Bloomberg.
- Workers could take up to a 10% reduction in salary if they relocate. The offer will be available until the end of 2020, Bloomberg reports.
- VMware, Facebook, and Twitter will also reevaluate compensation for anyone who opts to move outside of the Bay Area as offices remain closed due to the coronavirus pandemic.
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Payments company Stripe has reportedly started offering a new deal to its employees based in major cities: move out of New York, Seattle, or the Bay Area and take a pay cut — but also receive a $20,000 bonus.
That’s according to a report from Bloomberg’s Anders Melin, who reported that Stripe employees may see as much as a 10% cut to their base salary for relocating, and that the offer will be available to anyone who decides to move before the end of 2020.
A spokesperson for Stripe did not immediately respond to Business Insider’s request for comment.
Several other tech companies have started examining employee pay as more workers leave expensive cities like San Francisco for places with a lower cost of living and more space. Software company VMware, which has said its employees may work remotely on a permanent basis, has decided to reduce the salaries of those who have moved to less expensive cities by as much as 18%, according to a recent Bloomberg report.
In late May, Facebook announced that it would allow employees to work from home on a permanent basis, but that the company will adjust pay based on where they choose to live beginning in January, according to The New York Times.
Twitter had already been moving toward a decentralized workforce and had a policy in place that localizes pay based on where employees live. During an appearance on "The Boardroom: Out of Office" podcast last month, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said that the rise of the internet should have made employees' location "irrelevant," and that the company had been mulling a shift to remote work before the coronavirus.
"The reason why is like, every entrepreneur I talk to that's doing something internet-related today, they're starting their companies not having an office, not having a headquarters, not having a requirement that everyone has to be in San Francisco," Dorsey said on the podcast. "No one wants to move to San Francisco anymore, no one can afford to live in San Francisco anymore, so they're hiring people all over the country, all over the world."
At Stripe, the company has been shifting toward more remote work for over a year. In May 2019, the company launched a remote engineering hub, which the company said is on par with its physical spaces in Seattle, San Francisco, Singapore, and Dublin. The hub employed 100 engineers as of May 2020, and Stripe says that 22% of its total population of engineers works remotely.