A young Yelp employee was fired less than two hours after writing an open letter to CEO Jeremy Stoppelman about unlivable wages.
25-year-old Talia Jane posted the open letter last week and the low level wages her and her fellow employees are being paid:
An Open Letter To My CEO: https://t.co/F7ekRtOm04
— Lady Murderface (@itsa_talia) February 19, 2016
She then updated to let people know she had been fired:
google says my work email address doesn’t exist, which means i have officially been fired from Yelp/Eat24 for writing this.
— Lady Murderface (@itsa_talia) February 20, 2016
Talia writes:
“So here I am, 25-years old, balancing all sorts of debt and trying to pave a life for myself that doesn’t involve crying in the bathtub every week. Every single one of my coworkers is struggling. They’re taking side jobs, they’re living at home. One of them started a GoFundMe because she couldn’t pay her rent.”
She also explains that because so much of her wages go to her rent. She gets paid $733.24 every two weeks, and her rent is $1245. That makes 80% of her wages going straight to her rent, as she lives and works in San Francisco where living expenses of some of the highest in the country. She can’t even afford to buy groceries:
“I haven’t bought groceries since I started this job. Not because I’m lazy, but because I got this ten pound bag of rice before I moved here and my meals at home (including the one I’m having as I write this) consist, by and large, of that. Because I can’t afford to buy groceries.”
Stoppelman insists that Talia’s firing had nothing to do with her open letter.
1/5 Late last night I read Talia’s medium contribution and want to acknowledge her point that the cost of living in SF is far too high.
— Jeremy Stoppelman (@jeremys) February 20, 2016
2/5 I have been focused on this issue, backing anti-NIMBY group SFBARF and speaking out frequently about the need to lower cost of housing.
— Jeremy Stoppelman (@jeremys) February 20, 2016
3/5 I’ve not been personally involved in Talia being let go and it was not because she posted a Medium letter directed at me.
— Jeremy Stoppelman (@jeremys) February 20, 2016
4/5 Two sides to every HR story so Twitter army please put down the pitchforks. The reality of such a high Bay Area cost of living is…
— Jeremy Stoppelman (@jeremys) February 20, 2016
5/5 entry level jobs migrate to where costs of living are lower. Have already announced we are growing EAT24 support in AZ for this reason.
— Jeremy Stoppelman (@jeremys) February 20, 2016
Talia fired back, saying she was told that her firing was a direct result of her open letter:
someone at Yelp PR is informing people who call that my termination wasn’t related to my letter. lol & ice cubes don’t melt in heat.
— Lady Murderface (@itsa_talia) February 20, 2016
the HR lady & my manager straight up told me that the letter violated Yelp’s “Terms of Conduct” and that’s why they had to let me go.
— Lady Murderface (@itsa_talia) February 20, 2016
Stoppelman is correct that the cost of living in San Francisco needs to be lowered. Recently home prices have surged due to home-sharing. And, of course, the fight for a livable wage being higher than the current $7.25 federal minimum wage is happening nearly everywhere across the country. But it does seem fishy that Talia was fired almost immediately after her open letter was published.
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