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

Medical Issue

[ronaldbeal]

This is a known medical condition :SMACSS Social Media Assisted Career Suicide Syndrome. Researchers are still searching for a cure!

I already posted this on another site....

[tlambert]

I wish we were responding to her actual letter, rather than your portrayal of her letter, and your spin on the situation.

I'm going to respond to her letter, rather than to you.

===

Starting wages for her position at Yelp are nearly $10/hour over minimum wage. Assuming she worked a full 40 hour week, she was making a minimum of $35,360/year.

That yields, given California and federal tax rates:

$680.00 = Weekly Gross Pay
$086.59 = Federal Withholding
$042.16 = Social Security
$009.86 = Medicare
$017.79 = California
$006.12 = SDI

$517.48 = Net Pay

$26,908.96/year gross income

Accept her "80% goes for rent" number as fact. That yields:

$21527.168 / year
= $1793.93 / month

This is a quite high rent, and implies she's living alone, with no roommates. We'll get back to that.

$5,381.79 = non-rent disposable income/year
$448.48 / month
$103.49/week

This is low, but it's livable. She does not qualify for SNAP (food stamps), even after income deductions: she is not below 200% of the federal poverty level. In other words: 30% of people live on less than that.

Let's revisit the rent.

A ForRent.com search (not the best site, but representative) shows 6 apartments in Emeryville -- a nice area, near Berkeley, but across the Bay Bridge from San Francisco, for less than $800/month. All of them near public transportation; 2 of them have pools.

That's without taking a roommate. So she could have halved her monthly rent, if she was willing to live somewhere *not actually in San Francisco*.

That's another $993.93/month in her pocket...
= $229.36/week
+ $103.49/week
= $332.85/week ...which covers everything she complains about in her letter, plus adds some spending money. She'd have more if she split the rent on a more expensive apartment with a roommate.

I'm not feeling very sympathetic right now.”

Re: I already posted this on another site....

[Anonymous Coward]

She states in her original post that she lives far enough out in the East bay that her daily commute via public transit is $5+ each way. $10/day * 5 days a week * 4 weeks comes to at least $200 a month for transportation alone. Your rental search may have turned up a few $800/month apartments but generally those are either reserved for low income, or get you a small walk-in-closet sized bedroom in a house with 5+ roommates. Most listings on those sites are outdated and no longer available the day after they're posted and have 20-30 people fighting over them. Typical rent in Emeryville is about $1400 for a small studio, increasing by at least $100 annually. I just moved from there, precisely because it's that insane. It's pretty much impossible to find anything unless you're an exec or engineer making six figures. Another option is Oakland, but anywhere in Oakland you're looking at drug dealers and homeless heckling you as soon as you get near public transportation, and weekly shootings near your apartment. Bay area is hell on earth unless you're among the privileged six-figure crowd. #formerengineer

Re:I already posted this on another site....

[Nemyst]

I don't quite know how you did your search, but I just did the same and found just one apartment for less than $900/mo ($785 to be exact), and it's located in East Oakland, which is not a place I'd recommend. That apartment also has income restrictions, so she may not even be eligible (the site doesn't list restrictions for single occupancy).

For apartments actually in Emeryville, you're looking at closer to $2-3k/mo, which is pretty damn close to the $1800/mo estimate, even perhaps with a roommate since two bedroom apartments are more expensive. If you have to work in SF, you're looking at over an hour commute each way, public transportation or not. On top of that, you have to be able to move around in Emeryville and, like most cities in the US, that pretty much requires a car. I've tried to do without in Emeryville: getting through your day without one is a nightmare, and I was living very close to my workplace at the time. Shops are often not on bus routes, especially grocery stores and pharmacies. There are very few places to eat out at within walking distance, assuming you even have the money to do so.

The long and short of it is that Oakland has a lot of bad neighborhoods, Emeryville is basically SF's extended shopping district (some even just say Emeryville is SF's Ikea because the only one in the area is there) and so super car-focused, and Berkeley is expensive and even further to commute from. Your options are limited, and the commute sucks. SF is one of the worst places to be when it comes to working on low wages, and companies like Yelp (who absolutely do not need to be in SF) should take that into account.

Re:I already posted this on another site....

[frnic]

I wont bother to check all your math, since you blew it in the first line: At $10/hr she would be making $20,400 per year gross, not $35K. There are 2040 work hours in a normal year, (40x51) if per chance she worked 52 weeks with NO days off at all, it would still come out to $20,800.

So, bzzzt, not interested in the rest of your justification.

Re:I already posted this on another site....

[dgatwood]

Starting wages for her position at Yelp are nearly $10/hour over minimum wage. Assuming she worked a full 40 hour week, she was making a minimum of $35,360/year.

According to her letter, she was making $8.15 per hour after taxes, which comes to about ten bucks before taxes. Another article said that it was actually $12.25 per hour, which is the SF minimum wage, not $10 above it. Either way, unless those numbers are just outright fabrications, she was not making $10 per hour over minimum wage.

Accept her "80% goes for rent" number as fact. That yields:

$21527.168 / year
= $1793.93 / month

This is a quite high rent, and implies she's living alone, with no roommates. We'll get back to that.

Her letter also gives her actual rent at $1245 per month. You started from a wrong assumption, and all your math from there on down is wrong proportionally.

A ForRent.com search (not the best site, but representative) shows 6 apartments in Emeryville -- a nice area, near Berkeley, but across the Bay Bridge from San Francisco, for less than $800/month. All of them near public transportation; 2 of them have pools.

I see nothing under $1600/month in Emeryville. I do see two in Oakland in that price range. Either way, I'm assuming she got a two-bedroom apartment with the intent to find a roommate, but then was unable to find one because everybody else on her team was living with a parent. That's certainly what the letter implied. And the problem is, once you've signed a lease, you're kind of stuck with it. And at $12.25 per hour, you can't exactly stay in a hotel until you can find a place, because even the worst rathole of a hotel in the Bay Area is likely to cost more than $330 per week.

Re:Some perspective

[__aaclcg7560]

Also, the low temperature doesn't get below freezing so there's no need to ever run a heater.

I live in San Jose and work in Palo Alto. I have to be at the bus stop at 6AM to take the express bus and be at work at 7AM. We had a few mornings where the temperature was 30 degrees. Most of the time the early morning temperature is 40 to 50 degrees. On those nights, I'm running the heater in addition to the extra blankets.

A better written response, with link to the letter

[tlambert]

A better written response, with link to the letter

Here: https://medium.com/@StefWillia...

I refuse to link the letter in question directly. It's crap.

Re:And this is...news?

[Joe_Dragon]

And at that point, the game is over.

Well before that when people find out that living in the jail / prison is better and if the GOP get's there way the doctors will be better there and cover more.

Then the state is spending a lot more then just covering more. Now in some places we need a higher min wage and or basic income.

Re:And this is...news?

[R3d M3rcury]

One thing I'd point out is that her apartment isn't in San Francisco, it's about 30 miles out.

There are things to be said for both sides. Yes, I have no problem with Yelp firing her. The, "Gosh, I was told I'd have to work for an entire year before I could consider being an internal candidate" is pretty silly. As someone else said, she should consider getting rid of her one bedroom and finding a roommate to live with. If a one bedroom apartment is $1245 where she lives, I'm sure she can find two bedroom apartments for $1800 or so that she could share and end up paying less rent and possibly less in utilities. She should also start figuring out what things cost--if she's close to a mass-transit line, it may be worthwhile to dump her car.

That said, Yelp might want to consider whether what they are paying people will aid them in getting the employees they want. I've seen plenty of companies who pay crap and treat employees like crap and then can't understand why they have such high employee turnover and low employee morale. "These kids today don't want to work! They're spoiled brats who think the world owes them!" It might also be smart to move a customer service call center somewhere else where you can pay people your current rates but it's cheaper for people to live and not have to worry about employees being unable to get into work because they have no money. While there's lots of technical talent in the Bay Area, you might be able to find better customer service people elsewhere.

Re:Revolutions

[Aighearach]

either convince people to vote for someone that will fix the problem, or convince people the system is not democratic (which may be the case or not: what matters is how it is perceived) and they should revolt.

Or install remote gun turrets at the bottom of the driveway.

It isn't enough to present an abstract set of conditions when people might overthrow a democracy. There are millions of us who are patriotic enough to fight for our republic even if you raise however many rebels who decided it isn't freedomy enough and they're going to try a dictatorship. Nope. That just adds up to a bunch of dead rebels.

Most of the idiots who say this shit don't even vote, and have no idea the depth of patriotism of many around them, left right and center.

If you don't find a political solution that is reasonable and has enough votes and is legal, you just won't have your concerns addressed. Even if the concern is people starving. It is as simple as that, really.

Re:And this is...news?

[Parafilmus]

anyone who publicly points out that wages paid are too low to survive in San Francisco should get fired?

Its not what she said. Its how she said it.

Ms Jane's blog post included a link to her bosses' home address and a picture of his house. She shared it on twitter using the pseudonym Murderface.

I don't want to dismiss her complaints. Her complaints are serious and Yelp would be foolish to ignore them.

But if you were in charge of HR in this scenario, would you decide to keep an employee who uses the name Murderface and posts the bosses home address on her blog?

Re:Kinda creepy...

[Parafilmus]

"Lady Murderface" is the name she used to share the post on Twitter. The name probably colored my initial perception of the post, because it doesn't actually seem creepy on a second read.

That's kinda what I meant by professional context though... I don't mean she shouldn't have taken her complaint public; the public forum is definitely the place for it. But I wish she had focused more narrowly on the professional issue.

Instead she takes the reader through four paragraphs of autobiographical detail. We learn about her relationship with her dad and about her old living situation and how she won't get a promotion for at least a year. It all feels kinda self-indulgent, until she drops her bomb in paragraph five: Yelp employees are going hungry and some of them are homeless. Holy shit, why did she wait five paragraphs to say that???

From peoples' comments, I suspect most readers aren't getting past her autobiographical opening. People are dismissing her as self-indulgent and unprofessional after reading a few paragraphs... by the time she reveals that Yelp has a real problem, she's already lost half her audience.

Amazed by cost of living

[Dareth]

I live in the southern US. I am amazed at the cost of living in big cities. I pay around $1000/month mortgage on my 3000+ square foot home on almost 4 acres of land. I can't even imagine paying that for something smaller than my laundry room.