It’s hard to be broke.
It’s even harder to be a full-time student, working multiple jobs and still winding up short at the end of the month.
Cal State Long Beach alumna Talia Jane, an entry-level employee for Yelp, can commiserate with the pain of being a millennial working for menial wages while balancing the intricacies of living life on her own.
Last week, Jane published an open letter to the Yelp CEO, Jeremy Stoppelman, on how difficult it is to exist on an entry-level paycheck for a company as prolific as Yelp.
It’s hard to live while “balancing all sorts of debt and trying to pave a life for myself that doesn’t involve crying in the bathtub every week,” she said.
Two hours after the letter went live online, Jane was fired from her position for violating “codes of conduct,” which Jane says a Yelp human resources representative told her over the phone.
And, to be completely honest, I have to back her on the financial predicament such a massive company has put her in. It’s terrifying to think that, just like her, I could walk away from this campus, degree in hand, and still end up unable to feed myself or cover the costs of getting to and from work.
It’s so easy to be written off as an entitled millennial, regardless of the amount of effort you’ve put into making it on your own. It’s so easy to be told that I need to budget my time, my groceries, my extraneous curriculars better so that I can afford rent and the basics of living. It’s so easy to be told I expect too much.
It’s easy to be told I’m not worth the standard of living I expect.
But in the reality of living as a working student at a public state university in 2016, I’m not the one that needs to be told I’m doing things wrong. And neither is Jane.
Critics of her letter have said she should have chosen a less expensive apartment to live in or reworked her monthly budget to have more of a safety net.
In San Francisco, though, the inane cost of living is undeniable even to Yelp itself. After Jane’s letter went viral, a representative published a response agreeing with her points about San Francisco rent and marking it as one reason Yelp headquarters are expanding to Phoenix, Arizona.
Interestingly, though, that same representative said that wages for employees that relocate to the Phoenix office will be equal to or higher than that of San Francisco employees, despite Phoenix’s far lower cost of living.
This just adds support to Jane’s claims that Yelp has its financial priorities completely misarranged.
“I could handle losing out on pistachio nuts if I was getting paid enough to afford groceries,” she said, referencing the fancy snacks kept stocked in the offices that cost over $20,000 which could be redirected to supplementing employee salaries.
The priorities being tended to in this day and age are not realistic or sustainable in any sense of the word. The way that corporations like Yelp view their incoming employees is not just harmful, but offensive at best.
Yes, it might be nice to view individuals in the frame of asking for what they know they can’t have, but it’s always worth considering what they’ve actually done to land a job.
Between the years of higher education, the thousands of dollars spent in tuition to land a degree and the amount of time spent in interviews just to get a job after graduation, there’s no shortage of dedication to locking in a better future.
I just want to be sure that a better future is even possible.