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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.
This has been covered elsewhere, and never with so much horseshit bias. No editorialization should be needed for news, which is why no one likes Bennet Hasslehoff either.
Didn't we reject this nonsense about the time Glenn Beck refused to deny raping and murdering that girl?
And I am sure it had nothing to do with her getting alcohol delivered to her while at work or bragging about making sexual jokes to the companies twitter account. It's either quite a coincidence or she knew she was in trouble and wrote the letter to try and make the company look worse.
In my contract it is forbidden that i discuss my salary with anybody, especially in public in connection with my employer.
She deserves a living wage, because if greedy imbeciles don't stop violating the social contract ...
If she was making $8.15/hr in SF, she is an idiot. I live in the Bay Area, and we can't even hire no-skill warehouse clerks for less than $15/hr. The SF area is way past full employment, and nearly every company has vacancies that they are struggling to fill.
My impression from skimming TFA is that this was a telecommuting position, which means the pay rate is disconnected from geography, and she is basically competing for wages with people in Mumbai, while living in one of the world's most expensive cities. So what does she expect? If she wants to get paid more, she has to make herself worth more.
as a small business owner i can tell you all yelp is a disgusting piece of shit, worse than facebook, all they want is money for basically not removing you from any and all search results, they have no interest in helping consumers find what theyre looking for.
I agree completely: people should think clearly about cost of living and desired standard of living relative to salaries when choosing where to work. Then, when corporations can't hire the workers they want at the salary they are offering, they will increase their salary offers. Talia's problem is that she obviously didn't do that.
If you make $15/h in the SF area you are taking home ~$12.50 after Federal, FICA, State (no local taxes). It is possible a lot of it was taken out by creditors or the IRS for back taxes (which you could be penalized at a monthly rate up to the minimum income), but that's poor life choices, not your employers' fault. And once you have more than 2 creditors taking money out of your pay check, your employer may be able to terminate you (because it's a hell of a lot of paperwork).
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Yet corporations want the lowest wages, the lowest taxes, and all the subsidies they can lobby out of the government, but you're OK with *that* entitlement, right?
I'm just saying it's what WILL happen.
Indeed, history teach us that people revolt when they do not have enough to eat. But on the other hand, I cannot think about a democratic system been thrown away this way.
Therefore we are stuck with this alternative: 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.
This is very true. I understand why in the 90s, companies chose to be there - 80% of the world's VCs were there, and so that was where companies got started. Plus if you were a semiconductor or software company, usually the people you needed would be more likely found in the Santa Clara Valley than anywhere else.
After leaving the Bay Area and returning there on a visit after 10 years, I just couldn't recognize the place. Most of the tech companies that could be seen from the Bayshore Freeway in the 90s and even early 2000s were gone. The Microcenter near the AMC Theater in Santa Clara, which could be seen from the same freeway, had been replaced by a Walmart. Unlike previously, where the big offices used to be that of various tech companies, like the Intels, the Suns and so on, now it was mainly the consulting companies - KPMG, Accenture, et al.
I know that a whole bunch of the geek crowd w/ goatees love loitering in San Francisco to be in 'The City', but still, this fetish of basing their companies there totally escapes me. Particularly a company like Yelp, that could easily have set up shop anywhere else in the country.
Not even close. The original article says that she made $12.25 before taxes. Remember that people at the bottom of the pay scale pay much less in taxes (proportionally) than people making in the six figures because of the progressive income tax system.
This sounds like a number of startups in the Bay Area that prey on out-of-state people who don't know how high the cost of living is out here, hoping that they'll manage to squeeze at least a few months' work out of them before they quit and go to work somewhere that pays better... like McDonald's. $12.25 is, in fact, minimum wage in San Francisco. You can literally make that flipping burgers with no skill at all. And this is what they're paying people with college degrees, doing customer support work (which is usually at least a couple of tiers above minimum wage).
Now to put that in perspective, the average salary for a customer service rep in the Bay Area is $22.05 per hour. That means that Yelp is paying barely over half the regional average. And when people complained, rather than fixing the sweatshop-level conditions, they are moving the jobs to Phoenix. The only problem is that the average salary for a customer service rep in Phoenix is still $16.10. So that $12.25 would still be massively underpaid, given the job category, even in Phoenix. And yet somehow they're paying that wage in San Francisco!
I would like to make three suggestions to the CEO of Yelp:
You should reward people who have the courage to speak truth to authority, not punish them. If you don't, you'll end up with a company of "yes men" who will agree your entire company right down the toilet and into the ground.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
If you're going to San Francisco
Be sure to have some money in the bank
If you're going to San Francisco
You're going to meet some large expenses there
For those who come to San Francisco
Payin' the rent will be a worry there
In the streets of San Francisco
Young people, grey showing in their hair
All across the nation
Come see that abberation
People in trouble
There's a whole generation
With really no explanation
People in trouble
People in trouble
For those who come to San Francisco
Payin' the rent will be a worry there
In the streets of San Francisco
Young people, grey showing in their hair
When the copyright term is "forever minus a day", live every day like it's the last.
Please read the chapter "On The Wages of Labour", in "Wealh of Nations", by Adam Smith. It talks about why those who set wages have an inherent advantage much better than I could.
$8.15/hr after taxes? So roughly 10-12/hr before? Thats pretty much considered a living wage in Brewster County TX, ass end of the nation, and borderlands of the civilized world. Here, you can rent a shitcan 5 bedroom house for 1,200$ a month, and eat more than rice and beans for most meals at those wages. I do not recommend moving here, unless your hobbies consist of drinking and fornication, with a side of staring at a bleak and unforgiving desert.
But yeah, most places now days, $8.15/hr after taxes is a joke.
I've decided to Diversify my Holdings. I've divided my cash between my left and right pockets, instead of all in one.
Should it be a living wage to work as a fry cook? Should it be a living wage to work in a convenience store?
Would you like to live in a world where nobody did those jobs and you, therefore, did not benefit from having people to do those things for you?
And it's not about living frugally vs having a nice apartment with all the trimmings; it's about being able to live frugally in the first place. Not earning enough to pay basic rent and utilities and keep food on the table isn't something you fix by living frugally, it's something you fix by earning more money, and the people in these jobs can't do that without abandoning those jobs, which leads to the world described above.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
Should it be a living wage to work as a fry cook? Should it be a living wage to work in a convenience store?
Good questions. My first question: How do you define a 'living wage'? I generally define one as sufficient for a single person to live on, with a suite-mate. I've had online discussions though, with people who seriously wanted the minimum wage to be sufficient for single full time income earner to support a family of 4. In addition, as a military member who's deployed a number of time, my 'standard of living' is a bit lower than some.
Personally, I'd prefer to not set a minimum wage at all. I'd prefer to avoid mandating benefits either - mandating healthcare for full time workers, for example, has resulted in whole segments of employers only hiring part time workers.
But you still have to counter the race to the bottom. As such, I support a support system - either a mandatory employment program (I tend to call it 'FedJobs'), or something like a basic guaranteed income(BIG), such that employers who offer too little simply don't find any employees. Whether because citizens find working for the feds more profitable or because they find the wages too pathetic to work for under a BIG. A hybrid system is possible.
I don't read AC A human right
Yes, but she was complaining about her long commute, suggesting that she really thought she deserved an SF apartment.
Indeed, I think Yelp is mismanaged and doomed, like most tech companies that choose to locate themselves in SF. But that makes her choice of thinking about a career with them even dumber.
I wouldn't even care that much about any of this if all this bullshit wasn't likely to be eventually a burden on tax payers outside of SF.
'm not exactly enamored by that but it seems to be the most logical choice if one wants prosperity and stability. I'm open to suggestions.
I happen to agree with you. My only alternative is, like I said, a guaranteed job program. Which tends to end up being more expensive and getting less work done than hiring people suited for the work that needs to be done and paying the rest welfare. It's complicated.
Anyways, for a job program, step 1 is that it shouldn't displace regular employees. IE it shouldn't be for maintenance, though I'm sure it'll end up doing some. Instead, I think that they should work to create conditions such that they can find outside work, stimulated by the fedjobs work.
As such, I'd want them to be restricted to 'infrastructure creation'. Stuff that can be put on hold if the economy heats up and starts hiring them. I define infrastructure, in this case to be anything that increases the productivity or quality of life of citizens that can be expected to last at least 20 years with routine maintenance. So education is infrastructure. A building is infrastructure. A park is infrastructure, etc... Mowing the park is maintenance, not infrastructure.
Sometimes infrastructure can be on the part of business - say, a cable company's wires. The benefits of fedjobs should be public, not private. Fedjob workers shouldn't be helping private corporations, at least not directly. The closest I'm willing to go is the installation of utility lines and equipment for a not-for-profit, government or cooperative company.
If the economy heats up, you'd simply slow or stop the starting of new infrastructure projects as you lose workers, then slow and stop existing projects. Hopefully you'd have enough warning to get said projects into a state where they can be slowed or stopped without breaking down/losing existing work.
I don't read AC A human right
$12.50/hr works out to about $2K/month. A quick Zillow search of apartments in the SF area turns up nothing (not one) under $1K/month. The cheapest thing I could find (in 5 minutes, I grant you, but still) was $1300 - for a 140 square feet studio apartment (that's 14ft by 10ft - smaller than the single room I'm sitting in right now). Maybe she's an idiot for living in SF. But regardless, if that's what housing costs in SF, $2K/month ain't gonna cut it.
Deja Moo: The distinct feeling that you've heard this bull before.
Flipping burgers is only more intensive in the moment.
If you count the 4 to 8 years of training you have to prepare for writing code, the trade off is not so obvious.
You will have to stay up 24-40 straight hours multiple times to meet deadlines for a coding degree. You will have to work nights, weekends, and holidays. When your hands hurt from typing, you will continue to type to meet deadline.
On my last software project we had several divorces and five heart attacks out of a crew of 400. Not counting the "mystery contractor" who was hauled away unconcious from his desk and we never found out what happened to him. The young people from the contracting houses were walking around with double black eyes (not blue under the eyes-- literally purple black) from lack of sleep. Add in the constant pressure of being fired and losing everything if you fail to meet the unreasonable deadlines or.. if you just get unlucky.
Coding can be extremely stressful work. Once you learn to flip burgers, you are set.
Once you learn a software set, you are okay for maybe 6-10 years, then you must self-retrain and successfully get on another back breaking, hand killing project that leaves your arms in pain from tendenitus, screwed up shoulders and frozen muscles in order to jump to the new technology.
Coding *COULD* be easy work, but it frequently isn't. Development projects are always on an unrealistic deadline. Maintenance programming isn't so bad tho.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
You might enjoy reading this "open letter response".
https://medium.com/@StefWillia...
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.