title:  Yelp Fires Employee After Her Brutal Complaint About Low Wages Goes Viral (TWEETS/IMAGES)
text: A Yelp customer service employee was fired just two hours after her open letter to Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman went viral.Talia Jane, a 25-year-old living in the San Francisco Bay area in California, worked as a customer service rep for Yelp s Eat24 food-ordering app. But after the company caught wind of a blog post she d written about how she and many other employees of Yelp struggled to make ends meet, she was fired. In her open letter entitled  An Open Letter To My CEO , she wrote: 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. Another guy who got hired, and ultimately let go, was undoubtedly homeless. Jane also spoke of how difficult it was to pay her rent when the company would only pay her $12.25 an hour, which translated to $8.15 after tax. Of her monthly expenses, Jane also had to spend over $200 to take public transportation to work, as her apartment was 30 miles away.Jane had tried to find ways to make it work. She explored living together with a co-worker, but soon found out that most of them lived with their parents or also could not afford the rent on their wages. Jane said, I thought to myself,  Oh, I m tremendously f*cked,  so I m just going to try really hard on improving at this job so I can transfer and get a pay increase, but then I was told that wouldn t happen for at least a year. To pay her rent and bills, Jane cut back on groceries and did 40 hours of overnight shifts every week   but she eventually reached her breaking point. She told Business Insider: I brought up the wages in every quarterly meeting I had with my managers. They were well aware that I was struggling despite doing what I could with what I had. The last straw was when I woke up yesterday two hours after going to sleep because my stomach hurt from hunger. And it s something I m used to, but this time it was really driving me to put something in my stomach immediately   I couldn t wait 15 minutes for my rice to cook and it all became very clear that this shouldn t be an issue I was dealing with to the point where I forgot it wasn t normal. It was then that Jane realized she couldn t continue on like this. She decided to start tweeting Yelp s CEO.TwitterTwitterTwitterJane followed those tweets with a blog post on Medium, where she spoke of  balancing all sorts of debt and trying to pave a life for myself that doesn t involve crying in the bathtub every week.  She wrote: 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. 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. Because 80 percent 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? MediumDriving her point home that her payment at Yelp was NOT a living wage, Jane went on to explain:I got paid yesterday ($733.24, bi-weekly) but I have to save as much of that as possible to pay my rent ($1,245) for my apartment that s 40 miles away from work because it was the cheapest place I could find that had access to the train, which costs me $5.65 one way to get to work. That s $11.30 a day, by the way. I make $8.15 an hour after taxes. I also have to pay my gas and electric bill. Last month it was $120. According to the infograph on PG&E s website, that cost was because I used my heater. I ve since stopped using my heater. Have you ever slept fully clothed under several blankets just so you don t get a cold and have to miss work? Have you ever drank a liter of water before going to bed so you could fall asleep without waking up a few hours later with stomach pains because the last time you ate was at work? That post went viral, viewed by over 85,000 people. In an interview with BuzzFeed, Jane said: I wanted [Stoppelman] to understand that I wasn t some little, annoying fly buzzing around his head. I wanted him to understand that I m not some obnoxious idiot who thinks it s funny to harass the CEO on Twitter. I m someone who has concerns and is reaching out, hoping that he can do something. I was sitting there and thinking,  I hope he sees this and I hope my CEO listens and hears me,  and then it started to dawn on me: I wonder if I ll get fired for saying this out loud? It only took two hours for her to find out. Soon, her company email account stopped working, and Jane was fired. She said, My manager and HR told me the letter and what I wrote violated Yelp s terms of conduct. A spokesperson for the company released the insensitive statement: We do not comment on personnel issues. However, we did agree with many of the points in Ms. Jane s post and we viewed it as her real, personal narrative about what it s like to live in the Bay Area. Most importantly, it s an important example of freedom of speech. We agree with her comments about the high costs of living in San Francisco, which is why we announced in December that we are expanding our Eat24 customer support team into our Phoenix office where will pay the same wage. However, Jane insists that Yelp isn t being honest about why she was fired. She said, Yelp is trying to make this die down by lying about it. Firing someone while their post about pay issues is on the cusp of going viral, that s like a lightning strike in the middle of a super dry forest. Things have just exploded. Jane is currently trying to find a new job, and will likely struggle financially until she can (hopefully) find something more promising than her former position at Yelp. If you are interested in helping Jane, she has left these details on another blog post detailing her termination from the company:Featured image via Talia Jane