

She ended up leaving the company and moving east, somewhere the minimum wage could double as a living wage. One of them started a GoFundMe because she couldn’t pay her rent. “They’re taking side jobs, they’re living at home. “Every single one of my coworkers is struggling,” she wrote in her Medium post. She’s not alone in her plight, Jane says. This, Jane said, left little to no money available to buy food or any other basic necessities like heating. Her San Francisco rent ate up $1,245 each month, and her daily public transportation costs came out to $11.30. It’s a telling insight into the discrepancies between the lives of customer service representatives at tech companies and business and engineering folks with the same employer - sure, the company is the same, but sometimes, it seems like it can feel like a whole different world.Īccording to Jane’s open letter, her bi-weekly paycheck came out to just $733.24 - representing her pay of $8.15 an hour post-taxes. In a letter published on Friday via Medium, Jane details the financial distress that has accompanied her position on the customer support team at Yelp. And now, she’s also jobless - Jane was fired on Friday just hours after her post hit the Internet. In fact, writes Talia Jane in an open letter to Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman, she’s just about living in poverty, incapable of even buying groceries. But according to one Yelp employee, that utopian environment is nothing more than a myth - one that she’s never enjoyed during her entire tenure at the Internet company.
#Yelp ceo jeremy stoppelman fires free#
Yelp didn’t end up paying, but instead passed the blame on to Sidecar, the contractors it worked with for food delivery.When it comes to workplace perks, it’s hard to beat the tech industry. Glassdoor’s top places to work prominently feature firms from Silicon Valley and Silicon Alley, boasting free lunches, dog-friendly offices, rooftop bars, and highly competitive pay.
#Yelp ceo jeremy stoppelman fires drivers#
Last July, delivery drivers sued the company for $5 million based on unpaid tips. This isn’t the first time Yelp employees have been pissed off, either. There’s no mention of the need for food on the weekend or helping with public transportation costs. None of the company’s responses discuss its SF-based employees or their need for higher wages to match those skyrocketing rent prices. In another statement to Eater, the company said pretty much the same thing rents too high, moving to Phoenix. It released a statement to Re/Code that ignores most of Talia’s complaints and talks about high cost of living and moving to Phoenix. Since Jeremy’s last tweet about growing support staff in Arizona, every single response the company has put out since has focused entirely on the increasing home prices in San Francisco and the fact that Eat24 staff will be growing in Phoenix. Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman apparently saw Talia’s critiques, as he too jumped on Twitter to defend himself and put blame squarely on the rising price of rent in San Francisco Shortly after publishing her letter, Talia took to Twitter to alert those following her story that she had been fired, an action she says stemmed directly from her online critique. Living in the Bay Area, Jane says that she spends 80% of her income on rent, subsists off of rice, and can barely pay the train fees or car tolls to even make it in to work. He brought a big bag with him and stocked up on all those snacks you make sure are on every floor (except on the weekends when the customer support team is working, because we’re what makes Eat24 24-hours, 7 days a week but the team who comes to stock up those snacks in the early hours during my shift are only there Mondays through Fridays, excluding holidays. Another guy who got hired, and ultimately let go, was undoubtedly homeless.
