Remote work can help displaced people

Plenty of Western tech companies hire people from across the world. But often they’re taking advantage of cheap local wages or only offering gig work. Generally, they’re not focused on hiring people living in active war zones or countries barraged by floods.

Enter Sora Union, a new startup that’s hiring exactly those people. Built out of former Evernote CEO Phil Libin’s startup studio All Turtles, Sora Union specifically hires people displaced by climate change or conflict and pays them a global, standardized rate.

• “If a large number of people can work from anywhere and do very valuable work, why not hire many of those people that are at danger or at risk of being displaced because of climate change, because of war?” Libin said.
• CEO Nate Dalton and his co-founders weren’t planning on launching for a while, but when Russia invaded Ukraine, they decided to give Sora a spin. They began hiring Ukrainian workers and recently have expanded to other countries.
• Sophia Wajnert, co-founder and chief people officer at Sora, declined to offer the specific salary, but said Sora pays all employees the same monthly rate, regardless of location or the client contracts that come in.
• “If you move from Ukraine to Moldova to Poland to Ukraine, why should your compensation change?” Dalton said. “You're doing the same work. It has the same value.”

The type of work Sora Union offers isn’t novel. Neither is the recruiting strategy. The difference is their target hires are in places most companies tend to overlook for full-time, remote jobs.

• Sora Union offers two services for companies: localization, translating materials for companies looking to enter that country’s market, and design, which speaks for itself.
• Wajnert said she’s hired 20 people across 11 countries so far: Ukraine, Egypt, Jordan, Nigeria, Argentina, Brazil, Venezuela, China, Austria, Poland and Moldova.
• Maryna Rakovska, a brand designer in Kyiv, was one of Sora Union’s early hires. “Work is the one thing that makes me forget about the war,” she wrote in an email to Protocol.

Sora Union wants to leverage the power of remote work to combat displacement, even in a small way. Climate change and political conflict are already displacing millions — Sora Union isn’t going to single-handedly solve the problem. But its leaders are hoping their model will spread.

• Rafael Gomez, a labor economics professor at the University of Toronto, and Prithwiraj Choudhury, a professor at Harvard Business School, said the work-from-anywhere revolution is spreading across the world.
• “The number of people who are potential candidates for this kind of work, because of their exposure to technologies that allow this kind of remote work, is growing,” Gomez said.

If Sora finds success competing with other design/localization agencies, perhaps others will recognize the wealth of talent across the globe. That’s Dalton’s main goal.