Grab Asks Staff to Take No-Pay Leave to Cut Costs | Hacker News Reader

Grab Asks Staff to Take No-Pay Leave to Cut Costs

bloomberg.com

47 pointsjinonoel18 comments

Unlike other companies, the no-pay leave is voluntary, they are not forcing people to take leave(atleast till now). Also the amount of pay cut is replaced by RSU. I think Grab is doing good enough job to support workers and drivers and to support it's business.

P.S used to work for Grab till last week. Left because of personal reasons. Opinions are my own

Softbank backed OYO has done the same thing. While these kind of leaves are voluntary on paper, they are the only option offered. Formally company present this option to you, you show interest, you accept what they are offering.

Informally, the company asks you to accept whatever they are offering. You can always resist, you're very much likely to have the legal advantage. But you don't want to go through the trouble.

Edit - the only good part of the offer was 0 day notice period. They are betting on major chunk of employees to not come back, so they can bring back the one who are left (IMO 80% will leave)

Why not issue vouchers, at least to staff they'd rather not lose?

And if not some sort of withheld wage to be paid later, issue equity in lieu of pay.

They are issuing RSUs in lieu of pay.

Awesome! Feels like an important detail that Bloomberg should have in the article.

Difficult times for everyone right now, it might be a small gesture, but it's something.

But why is this good? RSU are pretty worthless right now... there's a lot of restrictions around it. Stuff like when can you cash them out, what happens if the company loses more money and shutters, what happens if you get laid off, and they don't help pay the bills?

Cash is king right now, especially in this economy.

Ideally VC mothership should pay for their continuation through crisis. Or none of the VCs included Corona like risk in their calculation?

Nobody included that risk in their calculation.

Taleb did

They are becoming way too haughty in recent years.

Expanded from ride sharing to meal deliveries to coupons to VC fund (yup, a startup with it's own VC fund, ironic), to digital banks etc.

Cut the crap and focus.

They will die if they just ride-share.

See Uber and Gojek (Gojek expanded to more businesses than Uber).

They're not a startup. They're a giant owned by some of the richest business families in the region that essentially kicked Uber's ass out of South East Asia because they execute a lot better in a market where BOTH legacy Taxis and public transport are really good :-)

We took a vacation in Bay Area last year and were shocked how poor transport and food delivery options were compared to the big cities in Asia.

“And, beginning in May, the ride-hailing company will reportedly put forward a 30 percent reduction in pay for executive leadership, 20 percent for vice presidents and 10 percent for all other staffers who are exempt per a Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filing.”

This stuff grinds my gears. I think they could take a bigger pay cut. I see this everywhere not just with Grab. The CEO Anthony Tan is in the top 50 riches people in Malaysia.

You do realize that % based cuts are already progressive right?

Hmmm yeah I can’t find a solid source for any for how much anybody is getting their pay cut. I saw some articles from around April 1 that said the executives were getting up 20% pay cut. Some of the current articles are saying 30% for the execute and some are saying up to 20. I’m not sure

Going to get myself in trouble again :-) Just to make sure I don't come across the wrong way, I applaud this kind of measure. Voluntarily taking a 30% pay cut is a difficult thing to do. Also, I'm going to say this without knowing anything about Grab (no idea how much the executive gets paid or what their life situations are like). However, it is very possible that a 10% cut at the low end of the pay scale can mean that you literally can't make ends meet, while a 30% cut at the top end can mean almost nothing to your day to day needs.

I mean it would be crazy to say, "Well some of our staff won't be able to make their mortgage payments or pay their rent, so I'll reduce my salary to the point where I also can't make my mortgage payments". However, it's probably not wrong to say that for many executives, such a cut is mainly a show of solidarity as opposed to something that will put them in the same situation as other employees.

The nature of executive compensation is often different than rank and file employees. A common trick is to say "The leadership team took a 30% paycut, so the 10% paycut you are taking isn't so bad" however executive pay is often split between equity, bonus and base compensation with equity and bonus making up more than 50% of the total comp. Often when they say 30% they are talking about 30% of base.

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