I certainly think it has to burst, but I’m through giving my kids career advice. 
alh, every kid at some point has the moment they realize their parents actually may know a thing or two…followed a couple years later when they have the realization that goes something like this…“ahhhh I am becoming just like my mother” translation as I grow older and live in the real world I realize my parents are not ignorant foolish closed minded people cut off from reality.
SO, Yelp did hire a LOCAL person unlike someone claimed hiring out of stater.
No, in her words, she moved there for the job because she hoped that her move would bring her closer to her father. She did not come there for an interview - Yelp recruits heavily on college campuses. The recruiter should have known better than offering a minimal wage job to someone who would need to relocate to SF.
I find it interesting that Amazon got a lot of heavy bashing here because its well-paid white collar workers are required to put up with long hours, and a bunch of kids who are paid minimal wage and are also required to bust their tails for Yelp get zero sympathy.
ANYONE who moves to the Bay Area and complains about the ridiculously high cost of living there gets zero sympathy from me-- including my extended family members who live there.
Anyone who writes
is bound to be unhappy where ever they go.
Um, no, no she’s not. She’s at least 23 years old, possibly older. ETA: others are saying she is 25. She is an adult by every measure. No matter what side of the argument you’re on here, let’s not continue the recent trend of infantisizing our young adults.
When I was 23, I was teaching school, and not doing a bad job of it. If you’d called me a kid, I would have been highly insulted.
Whatever the merits or not of this woman’s behavior, she owns it as a full fledged ADULT.
She is 25. Not a child.
She is 25. Apparnetly too grownup to have a roommate to share the rent but not grown up enough to take the responsibility of her own action of agreeing to the employment at the term laid out to her.
gmt I have said to people needing to escape the “terrible” place they are…
no matter where you go when you look in the mirror…there you are! you can never escape from yourself. i am not against relocating or getting out of college and trying a “new” exciting place, or some people truly need a reset after a traumatic situation. but for most people they are running from themselves, you can run far and fast but you never will get away. for many people they instead need to fix the underlying problems that are causing them issues.
“My company would have had every right to fire me if I put out a Twitter or blog saying that our clients were jerks to work for or that their products sucked. I will leave it to MOWC to go through the particulars of this case.”
The difference is that she did not do any of the above in her letter. She criticized the management and internal policies, possibly revealing something the management did not want to openly disclose. One possibility is that that Yelp could have a hard time recruiting such fresh college grads to work for peanuts by promising pies in the sky.
As much I hate to admit it, I was on her side for most of the letter. Once she started attacking the CEO directly, all hope was lost. I can tolerate an employee complaining about policy/pay/conditions/etc. all day long. But if you attack me personally, I will stop listening.
I wonder what young people think about this issue. This is something I talk a lot with my dentist. He compares his work ethic with his kids’ He would show up in his office if his patient needed him at 6 Sunday morning. His future-dentist daughter doesn’t want to intern in a dental office if she has to work on Saturday. I wish there’s an easier way to bring her to senses without telling her good luck finding a job.
I think it is one thing to work a gazillion hours a week for a one percenter salary…
and another to work those hours for minimum wage.
It also reminds me of a few young people in their 20s who showed up in my driveway one day while I was working on the yard. They wanted to talk, they needed my help. I assumed they needed odd jobs. No they were too precious for odd jobs, They had good intentions and they wanted me to sponsor them trusting their good intentions. It would cost me only $100. No, they weren’t swindles.
I like that life seems that easy to young people. We must have done a good job sheltering them. If all young people demand good wage ideal working conditions, maybe coorporations will have to bend. That’s not a bad thing if it can happen and some competition doesn’t step in and take their job away.
“As much I hate to admit it, I was on her side for most of the letter. Once she started attacking the CEO directly, all hope was lost. I can tolerate an employee complaining about policy/pay/conditions/etc. all day long. But if you attack me personally, I will stop listening.”
Yup. Even though what she disclosed about the CEO was public info (property records are public records, and his compensation is also public), it made her letter sound like a jealous rant. This is the same proverbial rake in the path of any Occupy Wall Street and Tent Cities etc. - as soon as they begin down the slippery slope of “expropriate the expropriators,” their cause is lost.
The irony here is that this is Yelp. They thrive on just such spleen-venting by the general public and basically alter reviews if the business in question advertises with them (basically a payoff). It looks very much like they can dish it out but can’t take it in.
This would have disappeared in general, and probably not appeared on CC, if they had said nothing and done nothing. The employee in question would likely have quit before her first year was up. Maybe she is an aspiring writer and decided to become famous as a way of going out in style at Yelp, being voted Useful, Funny and Cool. Who knows?
Here is a link to the Super Bowl expose if you want to compare:
OK, I understand the well-intentioned social argument, but this erroneous view of economics is why people make such arguments, yet wonder why nothing changes.
Unfortunately for the above argument, rental expense is a fixed, non-taxed operating cost. (In contrast, labor is a non-fixed, taxed operating cost) A corporate mortgage to buy a building is even better in that it is a fixed, non-taxed cost that has depreciable value over time for tax purposes. And in both cases, a lease or building ownership has appreciating value, especially if longterm. Therefore, a leased or purchased building in a high cost area most often ADDS to shareholder value because of the value of the depreciation coupled with the rising value of the property or the value of rising lease rates in the area. Thus, such a seemingly exorbitant expense is a good move for shareholders, if done properly.
Labor cost is not a fixed cost, like so many think. Labor costs are taxed progressively at several points - state, FICA, SS, etc. It actually costs a lot more more to pay just a little bit more - and that cost way beyond the value being performed. Therefore, increasing wages artificially actually reduces shareholder value and produces a negative return away you slice the numbers. It is the math that kills this idea - one simply cannot make the math work without raising prices or reducing quality. Oops - do that and two things are guaranteed to happen: 1) your competition kills you with its lower price or better quality because the consumer does not give a darn about your altruism and thus buys the lower priced / higher quality product, and 2) your employees will soon be out of job, i.e., zero income versus the income they make now.
More importantly, because building expenses are treated completely differently tax-wise than labor costs, there is no “save on building expenses and give the employees higher pay.” If one did that, the result is double whammy to investors, not a gain. The double whammy is the investors lose the value of a building or lease, and they then have to pay continuously higher taxes on the higher wages for a job production value that has NOT changed one iota. In economic terms, the previous sentence is just another way to define bankruptcy.
This is one of those good intentions that math cannot reconcile actually doing.
Two wrongs don’t make a right. Amazon shouldn’t have gotten bashing. Neither should yelp here.
If employers shouldn’t pay minimum wage (when they can get sufficient numbers and quality of workers to do what needs to be done), how much should they pay? How are their other costs relevant to what they should pay their employees?
Amazon made a cost analysis that it was cheaper to have a few ambulances on call (in case workers suffered from heat stroke) than it was to air condition their warehouse in Pennsylvania. When it became a news story, they retrofitted the building with air conditioning. Somehow the math worked out differently when public scrutiny was added to the equation.
Same thing was true in the Ford Pinto case. From pure cost/benefit analysis, it made more sense not to recall/retrofit and deal with costs of accidents. But once that analysis came out, the costs of accidents became much higher than projected.