Stripe clawed back pension contributions after staff cuts

(I work at Stripe and live in Ireland.) This article is written about <i>Irish</i> pension schemes. The mechanic that the article is talking about is standard practice in Ireland. And, in particular, it only applies to contributions <i>by Stripe</i> for employees who have worked less than two years.<p>Framing it as &quot;clawing back&quot; pension contributions is disingenuous (IMO). Stripe applied its stated pension plan policy. It would have been news if Stripe had deviated from its policy.

It is about a small number of employees in Ireland. Maybe &quot;Ireland&quot; should be added to the title?<p>In the U.S. (I&#x27;m not familar with Ireland), vested benefits, whether defined or contributed, cannot be &quot;clawed back&quot;. But unvested ones can, that&#x27;s what &quot;unvested&quot; means.

Disclaimer: I work at Stripe in Ireland.<p>This article is completely misleading.<p>In Ireland, if you leave your employment before the 2 year mark, you can lose your employers&#x27; contributions. Not the ones you have voluntarily put in.<p>This is pretty standard here (at least as far as tech companies go). It&#x27;s literally written in the freaking contract.<p>It sucks, but we all read our contracts when we signed.<p>The reason I can see an employer doing this is to serve as a retention mechanism. But it obviously doesn&#x27;t work when people get laid off.

If some one leaves the company or is fired for cause, claw back the contributions. If the company &quot;makes them redundant&quot;, claw back is nasty and immoral. People joined the company with a fair expectation that they would get benefits. It&#x27;s cheating to do this.<p>I now consider Stripe to be a gonif company.

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.

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.

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.

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

Stripe has pension?

They were being applauded a few months ago as to how to make people redundant. As if there&#x27;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.