Palantir drops planned UK pension cuts
Employees who joined before April 2020 would have been impacted by the proposed pension reductions
The US-based data analytics company Palantir has abandoned plans to reduce company pension contributions in the UK following complaints from workers.
In the UK, Palantir has a workforce of around 850, and those who joined more than two years ago would have been impacted by the pension cuts.
According to the Financial Times, Palantir informed its UK employees in September that the company was thinking about reducing its contribution to the pensions of its longer-serving employees from 10% of pay to 6%.
The firm said that the adjustment will bring the pension contributions received by UK hires who began working after April 2020 and those of all other hires into line.
A quarter of UK employees would have been impacted by the planned move, which was set to go into force in January 2023.
Following the announcement, over 200 employees joined a group on the business messaging platform Slack to talk about the changes. Many employees spoke out against the proposed reductions.
Shyam Sankar, chief operating officer of Palantir, held a conference call with staff members last Monday in response to the backlash.
One worker told the FT that the question-and-answer session with management was "brutal," and that it included a discussion of the salary packages of the executives themselves.
The top executives of Palantir received $8 million in total compensation in 2017. Alex Karp, the company's CEO, received $1.1 billion in compensation in 2020, including one-time equity awards connected to the successful completion of the IPO.
Following the QA session, Sankar informed the employees that the management had scrapped the pension reduction plan.
He also expressed regret for how he had brought up the concept.
Palantir said that its about-turn on pensions was just "good practice."
"It isn't unusual for a company to review its pension policy from time to time. However, it is also good practice for an employer to listen carefully to its employees," the company said.
"We take particular pride in valuing our employees as we know our great people are what drives our success. That is why, having engaged with those who would have been affected by the potential change, we took the prompt decision not to press ahead."
Palantir was founded in 2003 by prominent Donald Trump financier and PayPal investor Peter Thiel. The company helps organisations analysing large volumes of data from governments and other sources to gain valuable insights.
In 2020, the NHS hired Palantir to help with the Covid-19 response. The relationship, however, ran into legal issues, and the government ultimately backed down from expanding it.
Civil liberties groups, both in the UK and overseas, are concerned about Palantir's track record of secrecy and of providing its tools for government surveillance operations in the US and elsewhere.
Palantir is presently seeking a contract with the NHS for a total of £360 million, which is up for bid.
Bloomberg said last week that the data mining firm was developing a covert strategy to strengthen its ties to the NHS. According to this report, the business wants to buy up smaller competitors that already have a connection with the health service. That would allow Palantir to work with one of the world's largest repositories of health data, without drawing public attention.
Palantir's regional leader Louis Mosley revealed the approach in an email titled 'Buying our way in...!' in September 2021. It discussed "hoovering up" small firms that serve the NHS to "take a lot of ground and take down a lot of political resistance."
Mosley listed the qualities of suitable takeover targets in the UK, including sales of software services to the NHS; reputable leadership; and annual revenue between £5 million and £50 million.
Palantir is also pursuing a different plan that involves hiring from inside the NHS.
Indra Joshi, who had served as NHSX's director of AI, was recruited by Palantir in April.
According to Bloomberg, Joshi - as director of AI for NHSX - struck agreements and led a grant programme to finance tech businesses' development of AI to enhance disease diagnosis while providing access to NHS patient information.