PayPal sets its sights on employee pay equity

When PayPal CEO Dan Schulman saw the data and heard the employee feedback on a lack of financial wellness among the company’s lower-level employees, he decided to make raising their net disposable income a priority.

In 2019, the global online-payment company, based in San Jose, California, launched an Employee Financial Wellness Initiative and set a goal to raise employee net disposable income—generally defined as what’s left over after taxes and other obligations—by 20%. Last year, it saw U.S.-based hourly and entry-level employees’ disposable income increase as much as a 14-point jump in some markets from the previous year.

“There is no question in my mind that PayPal employees were better prepared to handle and address the challenges of the pandemic because of the financial wellness initiatives we rolled out in 2019,” Schulman said in the based company’s 2020 Global Impact Report.

PayPal accomplished this through several financial wellness measures, all of them for its 12,000 U.S. employees and some extended to its roughly 14,000 global employees. To achieve its goals, PayPal added these programs and benefits.