Girl at Yelp Writes Open Letter To The CEO Complaining She Can't Buy Groceries Because Her Salary Barely Covers Her Rent...Promptly Fired.
Refinery – Anyone struggling with a low-paying job and massive student debt will be able to relate to the story of this Bay Area customer service rep for Yelp, Talia Jane. She wrote an open letter on Medium addressed to the company’s CEO, detailing the difficulties she and her colleagues have trying to survive in San Francisco on minimum wage.
“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,” Jane writes. “She ended up leaving the company and moving east, somewhere the minimum wage could double as a living wage. Another wrote on those neat whiteboards we’ve got on every floor begging for help because he was bound to be homeless in two weeks. Fortunately, someone helped him out. At least, I think they did. I actually haven’t seen him in the past few months. Do you think he’s okay?”
Jane goes on to detail that she currently can’t afford groceries because 80% of her income goes to paying rent, as the tech boom has pushed the San Francisco rental market to nightmarishly high rents. The average one-bedroom apartment in the city is around $3,500 a month.
“I haven’t bought groceries since I started this job. Not because I’m lazy, but because I got this 10-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. Bread is a luxury to me, even though you’ve got a whole fridge full of it on the 8th floor. But we’re not allowed to take any of that home because it’s for at-work eating. Of which I do a lot,” Jane writes. Many tech companies keep snacks and even lunches in their office kitchens. “Because 80% of my income goes to paying my rent. Isn’t that ironic? Your employee for your food delivery app that you spent $300 million to buy can’t afford to buy food. That’s gotta be a little ironic, right?”
Yelp seemingly responded pretty quickly to Jane’s note — by letting her go.
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I’m so confused. Did somebody put a gun to this girl’s head and force her to take a job at Yelp and buy a 1 bedroom apartment in San Francisco? Is there like a serial headhunter running around the Bay Area kidnapping people and enslaving them into tech jobs? Unless that’s the case I’m having a hard time joining the pity party here. Ummm you took a job in San Francisco. Did you do literally any research before accepting it? Did they not inform you of what you’d be paid before moving there? Was it like a surprise or something where you show up to your first day and you pick out of a hat what your salary is? It’s like taking a job at the new Barstool headquarters then being shocked when NYC apartment prices are really high. If you figure out a basic budget for yourself and see that you can’t afford fucking bread at the end of the week, time for a different plan.
Yeah minimum wage is really low. That’s an issue that probably needs to be addressed for the poor to earn a living wage. But if you’re a college grad hitting the job market interested in the tech sector …maybe pick something that A) pays better or B) pays minimum wage in a more affordable city?
Or, option C, write an open letter to the CEO and go viral as hell.
PS,
Isn’t Yelp like very well known for treating their employees like trash? Moving to the second most expensive city in America to take a low paying job at a company famous for mistreating low level workers…yeah, don’t think I’ll be contributing to the GoFundMe.