Yelp Employee Posts Open Letter About Cost Of Living And Low Wages, Gets Fired (modernreaders.com)

whoever57 writes: Talia Jane was employed by Yelp in San Francisco but after posting in an open letter to Yelp's CEO, Jeremy Stoppelman, that her after tax income of $8.15 was insufficient to provide basic necessities like heating, food, etc., she discovered that she had been fired. How did she discover? Her work email stopped working. Even her boss did not know what had happened. Stoppelman denies having a hand in her firing, making the claim "(There are) two sides to every HR story so Twitter army please put down the pitchforks," replying to the criticism. He didn't personally turn off her email, perhaps he did not even make the decision to fire her, but as the person who ultimately sets the culture and policies of the company, his claim to not be directly responsible is unconvincing.

Comments

Re:And this is...news?

[Anonymous Coward]

Her complaint amounted to an admission that she couldn't find a job which would support her lifestyle choices.

That's a nice way of saying "Yelp doesn't pay some of its employees enough to live". Of course, we don't know enough of the story to know if the job reasonably could be expected to pay enough to live on (ie it's 40 hours), whether Yelp intentionally choose to avoid giving the person 40 hours/week to avoid certain tax requirements or other obligations for "full time" employees, etc. Nor do we know enough about whether she actually could live on $8.15/hour (after taxes) or as you argue it was actually "lifestyle choices"--hint, the ability to pay for food, heating, and shelter* don't qualify as "lifestyle choices" as a general point.

If she was qualified enough to get paid more, then options other than biting the hand which feeds her would have been available.

That is bullshit. Full stop. A person's only qualification to be paid enough to live is to actually show up and do the job. Anything more is a market failure.

* I presume cost of shelter is actually a big reason for the costing of living issue. It's why affordable transportation is often necessary. And honestly, if the cost of shelter is so expensive in an area that people require substantial travel time to get to/from their place of work to a home with a viable cost, they should be being paid the equivalent in compensation for those lost hours either directly or indirectlty in a higher wage. Sure as fuck, $8.15/hour after taxes is not a sufficient compensation for said travel time to live outside the Bay area, so clearly her complaint is actually valid.