Allstate Loses $17M NC Job Incentive Plan Due to So Many Remote Workers

Allstate Insurance is no longer eligible for one of the largest incentive packages from the state of North Carolina, created when Allstate pledged to add more than 2,200 workers in Charlotte. The insurance carrier said too many remote workers made the in-person jobs requirement impracticable.

The state’s Economic Investment Committee agreed this week to end a 2017 incentives agreement with Allstate, which could have pocketed as much as $17.8 million in cash if it met job-creation goals, The News & Observer newspaper of Raleigh, the Associated Press and other news outlets reported.

In 2017, Allstate pledged to add some 2,250 new employees by 2020 at its operations center. It was considered at the time to be one of the largest job-creation projects in state history.

But the rise in remote working, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, made it difficult to meet the company’s hiring goals, an Allstate executive wrote the committee earlier this month. At the end of 2022, only 213 of Allstate’s North Carolina employees were physically working at the Charlotte campus, said Eric Steffe, the company’s director of global corporate real estate.

Most of Allstate’s North Carolina workers are not in an office work location and are therefore ineligible to be counted as project site employees for the incentives programs, Steffe told the newspaper.

North Carolina paid nothing to Allstate from the initial incentives agreement through the Job Development Investment Grant program, but local governments have paid cash grants of $1.4 million, the newspaper reported.

Steffe said the company continues to view North Carolina “as a strategic market to attract talent, and an excellent place for our employees to reside.”

Since North Carolina began awarding Job Development Investment Grant incentives 20 years ago, grants that terminated early have outnumbered completed grants by a more than 3-to-1 margin, according to an analysis by the newspaper.