My viral article destroyed my life* *and I’d do it all over again
TALIA JANE was fed up with low pay at Yelp, so she wrote an open letter to her CEO. The backlash was swift — and harsh, but two years later she tells The Post why she has no regrets...
Iwas beginning my overnight shift at Yelp headquarters, passing by the coffee machines, when I saw a message scrawled in red marker on a large whiteboard: “I’m about to be homeless!”
There was no name at the end of the message, just a phone number. I texted it, knowing it had to be a support rep, and offered them a place to stay. After some back and forth, they declined — but the episode left me stunned. Someone had finally declared what was running through all of our minds.
This was in February 2016, and I was 25 years old. I had been working for four months as a customer-support representative for Yelp’s food delivery app, Eat24, based in San Francisco. The job involved answering hundreds of phone calls, e-mails, chats and texts from customers and restaurants through all hours of the night. If a customer ordered pizza from Eat24 at 1:59 a.m. from a restaurant that closes at 2, I was there to make sure the client never had a peep of trouble.
The position, which paid the city minimum wage of $12.25, required months of on-the-job training that many people simply couldn’t afford to stick around to complete. I worked upwards of 40 hours a week, earning $1,466 a month, 80 percent of which went toward renting an apartment 30 miles away in Concord. The apartment, which cost $1,245 a month, was the only one I had been able to find that was month-to-month. Transit fares to work and back cost me $226 a month. I was spending more than I was earning for simple basic needs.
I moved to the Bay Area from Los Angeles after dropping out of college, unable to afford the tuition anymore,
hoping in vain to establish some semblance of a relationship with my dad, wholived nearby. While I tried to find a roommate through work, I slowly accrued debt on two credit cards with a combined limit of $5,000.
My managers complimented my progress during a performance review and asked if there was anything Yelp could improve. “I’m not earning enough to survive,” I said. The overnight manager said he understood, telling me everyone else had the same problem.
“Unfortunately,” he said, “there’s nothing we can do.”
AFTER six months, I was drowning in debt just trying to stay on top of my bills. I was surviving on meals at work — chia bars and frozen burritos or food a guy I was dating bought for us to have together. I didn’t have any sort of social life. I only met the guy because we worked together. My hands were shaking constantly. My life felt abnormal and out of control.
On Feb. 19, 2016, I’d had enough. I was broke, exhausted and frustrated at Yelp’s refusal to listen to its employees. As I stood in my kitchen, waiting for my rice to boil, I thought: “This is insane.”
I made a beeline to my coffee table and flipped open my laptop. More than 2,000 words tumbled out on the blogging platform medium.com. I wrote an open letter to my CEO, Jeremy Stoppelman, detailing the plight of myself and my colleagues:
“Every single one of my co-workers 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. She ended up leaving the company and moving east . . . Another guy who got hired, and ultimately let go, was undoubtedly homeless.”
“Eighty percent of my income goes to paying my rent,” I wrote. “Isn’t that ironic? Your employee for your food-delivery app that you spent $300 million to buy, can’t afford to buy food.”
I had nothing, so I had nothing to lose for speaking out, but I still contemplated saving it as a draft. Then I thought of my co-workers. I hit “publish” and braced for impact. I shared the link on Twitter with the caption: “Might lose my job for this so it’d be cool if u shared so I could go out in a blaze of . . . people knowing why I got fired?”
Traffic on the post spiked in minutes. Within two hours my work email was disabled. Then my manager called, and he was on speakerphone — along with human resources.
“So, unfortunately, your post isn’t in keeping with Yelp, so we feel it’s best to part ways,” my manager said. Human resources then took over the call. I was told I’d receive severance —$1,000 — and wouldn’t be allowed back at Yelp. I asked to speak to my manager off speakerphone, one-onone. My voice breaking, I apologized to him for making the upcoming shift harder.
“Just . . . did you do it, Talia?” he asked, his tone turning from boss to friend.
My tears suddenly evaporated, my voice regaining some strength as I said, “Someone had to.”
We hung up, and I barked out a laugh. I was screwed. When I posted on Twitter that I had been fired, the steady flow of replies erupted into a tsunami. For days I would refresh my notifications tab on Twitter and see “150+ new notifications” at the top. I wanted so badly to tune it all out. When I told my grandmother the news, she let out a pained “Aw . . . Talia” and gently scolded me. People I hadn’t spoken to in years texted me. Two co-workers from Yelp discreetly invited me to catch a movie. When I showed up, one of them hugged me and kept saying over and over again, “That was so awesome, dude. You are so awesome. This is so awesome.”
People started calling my grandparents, who essentially raised me, pretending to know me and trying to get my information. Others tried to hack into my social media. I had offers to appear on TV but turned them down, worried it would look like I was glory grabbing. On the ad- vice of several commenters, I added links on my letter to my PayPal and Venmo accounts because I was now unemployed and added an update: “As of 5:43 p.m. PST, I have been officially let go from the company. This was entirely unplanned (but I guess not completely unexpected?) but any help until I find new employment would be extremely appreciated.”
THIS led to an even greater tide of comments, this time fiercely critical. I was labeled an entitled millennial fraud. Pundits tore me down. Michelle Malkin at the National Review took note of a $6 face scrub I had posted on Instagram, saying I was “indulging in a spa day with a fashionable face mask.” She also declared that she read my “screed” to her teenage children “as an object lesson in how not to be a grown-up.”
Someone named Stefanie Williams wrote a medium blog in response to my letter, insisting that what I needed wasn’t a living wage but to simply pull myself up by my bootstraps and stop whining.
“You are a young, white, Englishspeaking woman with a degree and a family who I would assume is helping you out at the moment, and you are asking for handouts from strang- ers while you sit on your ass looking for cushy jobs you are not entitled to while you complain about the establishment.”
Although factually off-base (no degree, no family support, literally just looking for another minimum-wage job), her rebuttal went viral. She went on a “Fox & Friends” segment called “The Wussification of America,” insisting I was a fraud looking for handouts.
A month later when the dust finally settled, I started selling everything I owned — books, movies, clothes, all of my pots and pans and every last piece of furniture. I used the cash, about $800 in total, to buy a one-way ticket to New York City and booked an Airbnb for a week in May. I spent that time hunting for an affordable apartment to share with my friend, using my income from a few freelance writing jobs to put down a deposit on a place in deep Brooklyn. I started applying for jobs, sending out scores of résumés across three boroughs. On some, I included the fact I had worked for Yelp. Out of dozens of applications I sent out, one got back to me: Starbucks.
I breezed through the interview. The hiring manager seemed to love me. He was relaxed and smiled, and at first I was certain he would be calling me back. But then he noted my Yelp experience and asked: “You were terminated from Yelp?”
“Yes,” I replied. Then: “I wrote an open letter to the CEO calling out the need for higher wages and they fired me.” I gave him a quick smile, waiting.
His eyes flashed from cheerful to cold. He began shifting in his seat, fidgeting with papers in front of him, not looking me in the eye. I was sitting across a small table from him but might as well have been talking to him from the moon. I knew I wouldn’t get a call back.
AFTER six months living off odd writing gigs, severance and donations — about $6,000 altogether — I got a dishwashing job in Midtown. I worked there a year with various second jobs, trying to put something substantial on my résumé. I often worked 16-hour days, sometimes squeezing in two hours of sleep between shifts. So many people had called me lazy that, despite knowing it’s not true, I felt obligated to prove them wrong.
Still, the backlash kept coming. One year after I wrote my post, Stefanie Williams announced on Medium that she had finally sold a TV show after writing an “article [she] wrote about millennials and work ethic . . . That article, I believed, was my golden ticket,” she wrote.
That article, in fact, was the one she had written about me.
Not long after, Sen. Ben Sasse (RNeb.) dinged me in his new book “The Vanishing American Adult.” Deep within his 273-page cautionary tale about “kids these days,” Sasse took a direct shot at me: “Our [Founding] Fathers ... would panic about the survivability of a nation if we have too many Ms. Janes.”
The same day I heard I was mentioned in Sasse’s book, my debit card was declined at the grocery store. I went home, laid on the floor and sobbed. I felt like I would be smeared for the rest of my life.
And yet . . . all of them — every single critic — ignored one crucial fact: My letter worked. It got people talking about the cost of living in the Bay Area. It prompted Yelp to interview their customer-support reps while my story was going viral. About 150 of my co-workers confirmed to management everything I had said in my letter, putting pressure on Yelp to provide a living wage.
On April 28, 2016, the Silicon Valley site Backchannel broke the news that Yelp was raising the wages for their customer-support reps, all based in San Francisco at the time, from $12.25 to $14. Yelp claimed the raise had been in the works since before my letter. “Still,” wrote Lauren Smiley of Backchannel, “members of the customer-service staff strongly suspected that [Talia’s] high-profile PR fiasco spurred their workplace wins, effective May 1 [2016].”
“I think Talia was the definite whistleblower here,” added one Yelp rep to Backchannel. In addition to increased wages, Yelp employees are also nowentitled to “15 days paid time off (up from five) and 11 paid holidays (up from zilch),” Backchannel said.
Whenthe story broke, I shared it on Facebook and congratulated my former co-workers. My friends who still work for Yelp have been careful to keep their distance on social media, but I saw a few re-post news of the raise. It feels comforting to know that while a whole lot of strangers yelled at me, I’ve still got friends on the inside who are seeing positive results.
Today, I’m holding down a job washing dishes and making smoothies, and I don’t have any plans to write an open letter about it. I’m always on the lookout for another job, and I’m working toward a career in comedy writing. I’m still struggling, of course, but I’ve managed to establish some semblance of a life for myself in New York City.
If I had to choose between the yearslong fallout for speaking up or disappearing into oblivion having never said a word, I’d hit “publish” all over again. That letter destroyed my life. And it was worth it.
I had nothing, so I had nothing n to lose for speaking out . . . I hit “publish” and braced for impact. — Yelp low-pay “whistleblower” Talia Jane