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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.
Well there is your first problem....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Google spends millions to provide WiFi to "refugee" camps in the EU as if there aren't poor people in the US that could use help. It's virtue signalling with political overtones and nothing else.
This is simple. FB needs to relocate the staff in their unit to some rural site in in North Dakota where those FB employees could no doubt afford palatial houses.
What you don't want to live there, you want to live in a CA area with insanely high real estate prices? That's not Zukerberg's problem, it's yours.
Facebook treats them like shit. They can't even use the gym, showers, healthcare, or recreational facilities at Facebook. He pays them squat. To Zuckerberg, these hard working folks are untermenschen. The irony is that Zuckerberg is the real untermenschen.
Well, there's the problem right there. They're being paid by the contracting company, not FB, so their real beef is with their actual employer. FB doesn't employ them, FB employs the contracting company. FB is using the cheapest bid for food service they could get.
So how are actual FB employees faring at the company?
-> I dislike sigs...
The headline and what can be gained is mostly a lie.
The two people are not employees of facebook they are employees of Flagship Facility Services and happen to be working for their company at facebook hq.
Because there's an infinite number of high-paying jobs just waiting for cafeteria workers.
There are many places you can live & work, but YOU wanted to work for Facebook
Might wanna bother reading TFSummary. They work for the contractor that operates Facebook's cafeteria.
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!?
Let me guess, if they didn't have a job you'd be complaining they're scrounging welfare recipients.
I think it's entirely legitimate to criticize companies for paying shit wages. If you want people to stop complaining about it:
- Increase minimum wage to $20/hour or introduce a universal basic income equivalent to $20/hour
- Abolish low and mid-density and non-mixed-use zoning and local approval bureaucracy that allows NIMBYs to prevent the building of new housing stock, so housing can be affordable.
- Improve public transport, so nobody has to spend $5,000 a year just on transporting themselves to where they can earn money and buy food.
- Provide tax-payer funded universal healthcare.
When we have those in place, then companies can pay whatever they want, as nobody will feel obliged to take any job, no matter how poorly paid, to survive. Until then, expect people to complain that they can't live on the income from the only jobs available to them.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
our resources are stretched so thin we can't even afford adequate maths for everybody.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Take that up with your contracting company not Facebook. And really? I'm not trying to devalue jobs, titles or what people do for a living here, but go improve and invest in you, make a better life for those three children; look around, move, relocate, whatever it is you have to do. Even if you were a Facebook employee, why is that Zuckerberg's responsibility? It's not. Why should he tour your garage? Did someone force you to work as a cafeteria contractor at FB? Who decided living in a remodeled garage space was where you were going to raise your family? I bet all those point back to you and your wife. No one held a gun to your head on any of this. Guaranteed.
I have a family, I have kids, I have a house (mortgage), I did contracting work for a decade for the governement and I got a-holed on salary, ate cost of living and made negative money to keep up with the rising health care in the early 2010's to now. I didn't once start to blame the company, position or the US government I did work on their behalf for for that, kept engaged, continually added skills, did the job the best I could and eventually landed a new job, better benefits, way better pay, more flexibility not for me, but for my family, the livelihood of us, our household, my future, my kids well-being and future college outlook, and it goes on.
That's just my summed up story to prove a point: many other people do this as well. And who do I have to thank for all that? My responsibility to me. This whole blaming other-people-for-outcome shit needs to stop, and the social cry-out voice that makes it a headline, as well.
Relocate and prosper.
Why do you assume that people who can't make ends meet on a monthly basis have the thousands of dollars it costs to move a family?
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
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.
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.
Statements like this make me queasy. You're telling me that we now have a society where we have decided that it's ok that raising the next generation is too expensive for ordinary people to do. There has to be something wrong with a society that considers raising the next generation to be something ordinary people can't participate in.
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.
YOW! $300K and it's not enough to raise children?
Really, you are telling me that there is something very, very wrong with our society.
Wow, that was a lot of words. You could have just written "I don't know what the word relocate means".
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Life is hard. Sometimes you have to do hard things to make it work. They choose not to.
Yeah, they need to just let their children starve for a year so they can save up for moving expenses.
I moved halfway across the country to get a better job for my family. It wasn't easy. I left behind family that I haven't seen since
Yet you were able to afford food, right? And you were able to get together the first, last and deposit for a place to live, right?
Your "hard" is actually quite easy compared to what you demand of the people in TFS.
Because again, you have not spent a moment thinking about their situation, and instead insert your financial situation into their story so that you can pretend there is no larger-scale problem.
There is more to this story here. Health insurance can't cost more that 10% of your income: Thanks Obama. So how can they not afford FB's own health plan?
They are staying in a garage adjacent to their parents house. I assume therefore this is in fact their parents garage. Mom and Dad can't give them a little break on the rent long enough for them to get some savings?
I mean seriously if my kid had nowhere else to go with his family, and was apparently this broke. I think I'd say "Shit son, I'll back the cars out and you can stay in the garage, rent free as long as you need; if you'll clean any bird crap off the paint when you come home from work each day."
I suspect there is more going here. Somebody has an insane pile of student loan or credit card debt would be my first two guesses. Spend every dime on some get rich stock scam that fell apart would be my third.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
It's easy to blame vices for everything wrong in society. If only people weren't having so much irresponsible sex. If only people weren't so greedy.
But since the beginning of time, humans felt compelled to take actions based on their emotions -- so if these things do make society a worse place, it should be a pretty steady drag on how "awesome" it would be otherwise. None of this is new enough to explain any perceived recent problems.
I reject the claim that the OP made, too, that our need for an ever-expanding economy requires a constant increase in our population (and our failure to do that is causing our economic woes today). The need for economic growth is increasingly decoupled from the number of available laborers! Automation and robotics are displacing workers already in jobs like cashiers, bank tellers and even security guards. Self-driving vehicles will displace MANY more. But growth in these industries won't slow or stop because of that!
IMO, greed is a human emotion that isn't inherently good or bad. It depends on how you direct it. Is it bad to get angry? Depends on if the anger compels you to do something constructive or not, really. Same with greed.
Take a quick look around that apartment (it's not a garage, maybe it once was, but it's one room apartment now) and note a few things. They have some pretty damn nice looking furniture. They have a projector. They have what appears to be a flat screen TV to the left. They have one of those "bladeless" fans that at least looks like a dyson. They have better shit than I did when I moved. They make $78K a year, which isn't rich, but I found numerous apartments for rent in Menlo Park for less that $2000 a month that are bigger than that "garage". Based on 78000 a year, without consideration for the 3 deductions they have, their after tax income in california would be $58000. That leaves 2800 a month after rent if they're paying that much. Not a ton, but I lived on less than that with my family in california. I didn't own a big TV or a projector. We ate mac n cheese a lot. And I found a way to save up enough to move to a better job and place for us all.
Sounds more likely to me that they have managed their income poorly.
The parents are even letting the kids stay in the main house. Do you really think they are going to give a large TV and bladeless fan to them?
I assume you meant "aren't even letting". And yes, that's exactly what I expect. That's the usual pattern with families like that. The fan doesn't work very well—give it to the kids. Replaced the bedroom TV—give the old one to the kids. Happens all the time.