In February 2016, Talia Jane, a customer-service representative for Yelp’s Eat24 food-delivery service, published an open letter on Medium addressed to CEO Jeremy Stoppelman. Jane described earning $12.25 an hour while living in the San Francisco Bay Area, where rent, groceries, and commuting costs consumed nearly all of their income. They wrote that the only housing they could afford was about 30 miles away in Concord and that they had no money left for food after basic expenses, while colleagues faced similar poverty pressures.
Jane said Yelp dismissed them shortly after the post, told them the letter was the reason, offered $1,000 in severance, and barred them from returning. Stoppelman denied the termination was related, and Yelp declined to comment initially; the company later publicly justified another employee’s dismissal after that worker issued a similar letter. In April 2016, Yelp raised Eat24 representatives’ pay to $14 an hour, added 11 paid holidays, and increased paid time off from five to 15 days. Yelp said the changes had been planned since the fourth quarter of 2015, while employees disputed that account and credited Jane’s disclosure with accelerating the reforms. The episode became a prominent technology-labor example of low wages colliding with Silicon Valley’s cost of living.
