'Dear Jeremy' Post On Medium Gets Yelp Employee Promptly Fired

A couple of hours after exercising free speech on Medium, a Yelp employee was exorcised from the company. The call for a living wage has made her the subject of ridicule by some in the social media sphere, but her open letter to Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman continued to be part of the growing debate on fair compensation.

Talia Jane, 25, wrote about her struggles to care for herself having been compensated $8.15 after taxes for her role as a customer service representative for Yelp.

"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 30 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," wrote Jane in the letter.

Her tale goes on to describe a life in which she wasn't bringing in enough money to sleep with heating on, so she slept wearing extra layers and fully clothed. Since she should couldn't stay asleep, due to an often empty stomach, she drank water before bed.

Roughly two hours after opening up on Medium, Yelp had shuttered her company email account and that was the way she found out she had been ex-communicated.

While the letter was addressed to Stoppelman, he says he wasn't the one who fired Jane. He also acknowledged that the cost of living in San Francisco was too high for people working entry-level jobs.

Jane later confirmed that it was Yelp's human resources department that decided to fire her, on the grounds that she had violated the company's code of conduct. Still, that conflicts with one of Stoppleman's tweets that state Jane hadn't been fired because she wrote the letter.