Yelp minimum wage row shines spotlight on … broke, fired employee

The real world

Here are some facts.

The national average for customer service rep jobs (which does not account for the extremely high cost of living in the Bay Area) is $16.29 an hour. At that rate, Talia would still have $570 a month to live on after rent, travel and heating. After eating that becomes around $300 a month. It really is very little money – $10 a day – but it is just about doable.

In the Bay Area as a whole, recognizing the high cost of rent, travel and essential services, the average customer service rep is paid $22.52 an hour. That would give Talia around $2,000 a month after essentials. She may even be able to start saving after paying off her credit card.

Yelp, however, is paying San Francisco's mandatory minimum wage of $12.25 an hour. And while a few other tech companies also pay very poorly (Yahoo, hang your head), the majority of the tech companies in San Francisco offer $15-20 an hour for entry-level customer service jobs. It's just about enough to live on. But $12.25 is not.

Yelp is not a small company. It is listed on the New York Stock Exchange. It also has a Silicon Valley-sized ego, with its CEO Jeremy Stoppelman putting himself on the same pedestal as Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg by paying himself just $1 a year while holding shares worth over $100m.

And yet while other tech companies pay their employees 20 per cent more than Yelp and offer more practical perks such as subsidized travel or subsidized rent as a way of counteracting the high price of living in the area, Yelp does not. Instead, it fires people that complain about the situation.

Reality check

The even more unfortunate reality is that Yelp is able to get away with not paying its employees sufficient wages thanks to the peculiarly American belief that if you don't have enough money it's somehow your fault for not working hard enough.

In response to Talia's post have come a slew of responses, all of which follow the same pattern: someone who is financially fine telling her to stop whining and work harder.

A frequently quoted response from a writer four years older than the ex-service rep starts out by questioning her financial situation, pointing to her Instagram of a bottle of bourbon: "It sounds like you've hit some real post-Haitian-earthquake-style hard times, so maybe some advice will help while you drink the incredibly expensive bourbon you posted on your Instagram account and eat that bag of rice, which was the only other thing you could afford!"

The selective shaming – which will be all too familiar to other poor folk who are used to having their impossible lives mocked by reference to the fact that they possess a mobile phone or smoke cigarettes or buy a weekly lottery ticket – continued, but it served only to highlight how bad her situation is, and how social media just paints the shinier side of life.

An ice cream sundae was given to her for free at a chocolate store. She picked up a box of Pringles left behind on public transportation. She posted pictures of them joyfully, yet her consumption of others' disposable wealth was used, with some considerable irony, to undermine her complaints.

In her critical response, Stefanie Williams makes an extraordinary leap: she recalls the fact that she struggled to get by when she was in her early 20s and then uses that as a way to undermine the complaints of someone going through the exact same hardships.

Empathy

The fact that Stefanie had to live with her mom because she couldn't afford to live on her own wages should, logically, make her an advocate for higher wages. But, for some reason she argues the opposite (incidentally, do you think Stefanie's mom would let Talia move in for free?)

Talia's point, whining aside, is that she works a full-time job that literally does not pay her enough to live on. While unable to afford food, she used her credit card to pay for travel to her job that was effectively costing her money. And yet, in Stefanie's mind, this was evidence of a sense of entitlement and a lack of work ethic.

In an even more ludicrous response, MBA holder and analytics manager "for a major retailer," Chris Hooker, gives Talia some advice on how to live in a big city on minimum wage – one of which is to stop living in a big city.

The rest of the advice comprises almost entirely of telling her to get a second job. It also suggests simultaneously getting someone to live in the same room as her – note, that's room, not apartment – and advertising her living space on AirBnB.

So the answer to not being paid enough to live on is to give up both your personal space and your free time. Literally nowhere in the article does the fact that Yelp is paying insufficient wages appear.

Trumpian

The willingness to attack people less fortunate than yourself because they have the temerity to suggest it's not fair is a particularly unpleasant but sadly not uncommon facet of some people's personalities. And it is perhaps best embodied in the current frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination, Donald Trump.

Only in a world that has elevated somebody like Trump would the response from Yelp's CEO to his fired employee be seen as "sympathetic."

In a series of five tweets, Stoppelman said he had read the post and wanted "to acknowledge her point that the cost of living in SF is far too high." He expressed support for a group of activists that is pushing for more affordable housing in San Francisco. He then denied any personal involvement in her firing, implied there was "another side" to the story and said the company was looking to move some of its customer service arm to Arizona "where costs of living are lower."

At no point did he consider paying the people that spend nine hours a day working for his company enough money that they can afford to buy their own food. ®