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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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
$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.
You might enjoy reading this "open letter response".
https://medium.com/@StefWillia...
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.