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Facebook Employees Living in a Garage Hope Zuckerberg Will Learn What's Happening in His Own City (cnbc.com)
At the beginning of the year, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg set a goal to visit every state in the U.S. so he could learn more about the millions of people who use the social network every day. But two of his employees tell The Guardian that they wonder when the billionaire is going to get to know his own community. From a report: The employees, a married couple named Nicole and Victor, are both contract workers in the cafeteria at Facebook's Menlo Park, Calif. headquarters. And they wish they, and the problems closer to home, could also get a share of Zuckerberg's attention. "He should learn what's happening in this city," Nicole tells The Guardian. The couple says they can barely make ends meet. Together with their three children, Nicole and Victor share a two-car garage adjacent to Victor's parents' home. They borrow money from friends and family to stay afloat and occasionally resort to payday loans. Although they earn too much to qualify for state benefits, they don't earn enough to afford Facebook's health care plan.
Zuckerberg is still partying on the collective dimes of investors who don't understand how facebook works - or why it still doesn't make money.
I believe you are completely uninformed sir. Facebook has been making consistent profit since IPO: https://www.theguardian.com/te...
Do you Gentoo!?
They probably have $100,000 student loans each. They do work at Facebook.
The headline is misleading. They work for a company that provides contract employees to Facebook for the cafeteria, as per the first sentence of the report:
The employees, a married couple named Nicole and Victor, are both contract workers in the cafeteria at Facebook's Menlo Park, Calif. headquarters.
These people don't work for Facebook. They work for a contractor.
Kids are expensive. Ultra expensive if you give them a chance to go to college. They are a major drain on finances. Like it or. Ot their own decisions have put them in the situation.
My wife and I make 300k combined in Atlanta. We are talking about 1 kid. Figuring out how we will budget for daycare, college, food, clothes, etc. plus any life emergencies and our retirement. Three kids would not only break us but be unfair to them.
Me and my wife live in Atlanta (well, Woodstock) and are talking about our first kid as well. We make less than 1/3 of what you do. Of course, we live in a suburb, own a house that is priced and sized correctly for our income and expected family size (2k sq ft) located in a very desirable neighborhood(10 minute walk, 1 minute drive to physically be in downtown Woodstock), own 2 cars outright, and paying off about 30k in student loans (one of the loans we just paid off in cash a few months ago). We contribute to my 401k monthly from my salary, my wife contributes to savings monthly from her salary, we do not live paycheck to paycheck, and have plenty in bank accounts to account for medical/home repair/car repair emergencies. If we have a kid, we could easily get by on my salary alone while my wife stays home to take care of the kid/does some light work from home or side jobs. You are doing it completely wrong. Move out of your Buckhead condo or John's Creek McMansion, stop leasing brand new Mercedes or BMWs every 2 years, and on 300k a year you could easily have enough for retirement and to put your kid through college debt free.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
This is the chronic issue. They work full time at Facebook, but Facebook outsourced this labor to a sub-contractor for cheap rates. They skirt employment laws by outsourcing labor. Then the employees are paid far below a living wage. It happens in all tiers of employment. The is very dominant in IT. Large companies outsource their IT labor to contractors and those contractors get a sub-standard wage and no health benefits. The company get's a good financial outlook on paper while large portions of their workforce are shafted. What needs to happen is a change in law, that which if you work full time for a company you must be paid by that company at least a living wage and health benefits. All this sub-contracting to skirt decent wages and benefits needs to end.
The root of the problem is a lack of affordable places to live that aren't several hours' commute from places where people work. I live in the NY metro area, and even 60 miles away house prices are high in good school districts. Northern California is way worse -- you're starting at a million for ownership of any kind of home, which means you need a job that pays an outsized salary just to have a massive mortgage payment.
This problem is repeated in cities all over the US to lesser degrees. Atlanta has very affordable housing if you're willing to put up with hours of driving, and Georgia has almost no property taxes...but in my opinion sitting on the road for another 10 or 15 hours a week isn't worth it.
One fix I could see is to make retirement stability easier to maintain. So many people in our area have little saved for retirement and are banking on selling their high-priced house and moving to North Carolina or similar. It's their only retirement asset, and in the current environment it's in everyone's best interest to keep these mini housing bubbles inflated until they can cash out.