Talia Jane Versus Yelp: BEST OF TANGOTI

where she worked to pay staff a living wage. Her story is fascinating and I think it tells us a lot about what we can expect from how big tech companies treat their employees. So let's listen in to tell you Jane versus YELP. There's a good chance you've heard of Talia Jane, even if you don't recognize her name.

When the country seemed to be having a love affair with crapping on millennials, Talia basically became the poster child for the whiny entitled millennial brat, but she also ignited a conversation about the living wage and took on one of the world's biggest tech companies and actually kind of one. My name is Talia Jane. I am a low wage worker, labor activist and occasional writer. UM my pronouns are she? They also and I live in Brooklyn, New York. Um

my social security number. I don't wait, that's not how this works. Tally's upbringing was complicated. To put it mildly, when she was a kid, her mom got involved in a convoluted criminal plot that left five people dead. You probably want to know more about that. There's a Wired profile about her that you can find on the episode description I lived. My mom was a single mother. She was working low wage jobs. She was, you know, like a secretary. She worked for Marrymids, the cleaning company. She

did all sorts of stuff like that. Um. We moved around a lot, lived in a lot of low income housing. UM, a lot of food insecurity. As soon as I was old enough to read, it was expected that I make my own food and do my own laundry and kind

of be the parent very very early on. Um. And on top of that, when I was eleven, Uh, my mom's three best friends were arrested for murdering five people, which I you know, obviously I had a response to issues with but it really spoke to her sort of chronic need to be liked by people and to go along with whatever people wanted, UH, to secure a sense of like stability and friendship, which was not translated to me. It was not a good environment that I was in.

And when that happened, UM, I went to live with my grandparents in southern California, and I was put in a stable environment for the first time in my life. Someone else was making dinner and someone else was doing my laundry, and they were very they were very firm that the only thing I had to focus on was school. UM. And then I bounced around a little bit more between

my mom, family, friends, UM. Finally went back with my grandparents, and then when I graduated high school, it was like all right, because they, you know, they're from a different generation where it's normal as soon as you graduate high school you are out and ideally also married for some reason. So on graduation day, my grandpa walked into my room and he was like, congrats, you have thirty days to

find a new place to live. UM. And so she's been a lot of UM instability, moments of stability that are sort of shrouded by this sense that um, the circumstances that I'm in are not going to last, and that they are not normal. Talia took out loans to attend cal State Long Beach, but eventually found herself having to decide between going to college and working so she could support herself. She chose work. She found a job lead that sounded promising at the food delivery site, which

was then owned by Yelp. She'd be starting out with minimum wage, which she said worked out to about eight dollars an hour after taxes, but it was a job and there was talk of her being able to move into a position with better pay. This job also meant that she could be closer to her father. I thought this would be a good chance to connect with my dad, who lives in the Bay Area and who I never really had bunch of relationship with UM. So I was like,

all right, we're gonna do it. Like I just opened a credit card and I put like moving expenses on there. I went up there and spent uh two weeks for two weekends searching for apartments, and I finally found one that was extremely expensive, but at a point like it was month to month, so I figured, you know, I could live here and I'll find someone at work to room with, and then I can move and it'll be fine,

Like it'll it'll all sort itself out. Tell you did something a lot of people have done at some point in their life, packed up on the hope that what she was leaving for would be worth it when she got there, and it was a chance at something that she really didn't get much of as a child living with her mom stability. Only that stability never came. I wasn't able to find a roommate. I did not get transferred to the position that would have me earning something

like a dollar more per hour um. I was working full time, minimum wage. I was living thirty miles away and paying something like eleven dollars a day to commute to and from work. And very quickly it went from this is difficult, but if I just keep pushing, something will break and it'll be fine, to oh, this is

not tenable. I was. By the time my letter happened, I was I hadn't eaten an actual meal in a while, and I had noticed that my hands were shaking constantly and all I was doing, Like when I went to sleep, I wasn't dreaming. I would just lay down and then my alarm would go off and I would wake up. And I would have been doing that for a few weeks. And I had something like twenty or sixteen dollars in

my bank account. I had gotten into positions where I couldn't afford to get to work because I couldn't afford to put money on my Clipper card to take the train, and I couldn't have put forward to pay the toll because I didn't have any cash. Um. And it just the situation devolved very quickly. And on top of it all, I didn't even get to like nurture relationship with my dad. We got coffee once, um, on our birthday. We share a birthday, and we got coffee for like fifteen minutes,

and I was like cool, Like that's you know. It

was not great, Um, yeah it was. It was. It was a lot of like you know when when people read my letter and they responded to it with like, oh, this girl so entitled, you know, it's like no, I was attempting to create something better, and I had been told by numerous institutions and people that if I did certain things, and if I followed a certain playbook, and if I worked really hard and threw myself completely into the work and dedicated everything of myself to that that

things would work out. And obviously that is not true. And I'm not saying that just because of what happened to me. But if we look at like the world, that is the whole concept of the American dream and pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, like these things aren't based in reality. They are pretty lives that we tell ourselves to make ourselves feel better for being constantly chronically

in pain. One day at work, Talis boss YELPS CEO Jeremy Stupelman sent out a cheerful all staff video blog something you did pretty regularly and something I just have to say. It sounds like the kind of soul crushing, semi mandatory motivational tactic right out of the movie office space. Seriously, Talia says that one of his vlogs is about how he styles his hair in the morning. Hearing her boss speaks so cheerfully about her company at a time when

she was struggling was her breaking point. In true Tali fashion, it started with a sarcastic little joke Twitter. She tweeted at the CEO offering to edit and watch his vlogs if he agreed to pay a living wage. Then she wrote him a scathing open letter on medium. If you've ever found yourself in an economically precarious situation, her letter

will probably sound very familiar. It's written with Talius trademark dark sarcastic humor, but in it she writes about not being able to afford groceries or heat and making rice for dinner most days. She describes how her coworkers teetered

on the brink of homelessness and eviction. Your employee for your food delivery app that you spent three million dollars to buy can't even afford to buy food, she writes, So walk me through how you were feeling when you wrote that letter in twenty sixteen, Like what was the Was there like a moment where you were just like I am over this or was it something that was

just like a slow burn inside of you? So I remember I was standing in my kitchen and I was drinking some water because I had tried to go to sleep, and I couldn't sleep because I was hungry, and so I was drinking water because my stomach was cramping, and I was waiting for some rice to boil, and I noticed that my hands were shaking, and I suddenly realized that these things that I had started doing, drinking water to get myself through the twenty minutes it takes to

boil rice, is that way. Then I have food in my stomach so I can sleep for a few hours while my hands are shaking. And like all these things, I suddenly zoomed out very quickly, and I went, oh, this is fucked. And I which is like, holy shit, I am, I am wait am. I led to cuss absolutely. I was like, holy sh it, I cannot believe I'm in this situation. And it immediately became clear that I had been doing all of the things that we tell

our else we have to do. And I had been putting in the work, and I had been making plans A,

B and C to make something happened. But the problem was that I was in a circumstance and in a place where none of those things were going to work, because the area in the Bay Area has become unlivable for people who earn six figures, and yet there are still jobs that pay a minimum wage in that area where people have to commute several hours so then they can live somewhere slightly more affordable, and they are still

failing to get by, you know. Like I suddenly like it all clicked together and I was like, oh, ship, I should be earning a living wage. And I started typing, and I thought about saving it as a draft. And I remember I like sent a picture to my friend of the rice that I was eating with my laptop open. I was like, I'm venting really hard right now, and the picture was blurry because my hands were shaking from

being you know, malnourished. Um. And I was reading it because usually what I do is I will write something out just to get the emotion out. And it occurred to me that like, there were more people that were struggling, Like if I have it bad, there are other people at the same job who also have it bad, and it's not fair to them to stay silent and to just go along with it when it's so clear how

fucked up things are. And of course there was like a part of me I was like, they shouldn't fire me, though, because this is protected. It concerted activity I'm speaking on my circumstances and on the circumstances of my coworkers and demanding something better, like I'm taking a stand for all of us. They would be very ignorant to um fire me. And then, of course, two hours later, my email got deactivated and I was like, oh, yep, Bump fired. And

that's when everything blew up. It was read by over two million people in less than two hours, and hitting published, she was fired from Yelp. Her time at Yelp might have been over, but this was just the beginning. It turns out, just asking the question of whether it's okay for a company based in one of the most expensive cities in the world to be paying staff minimum wage was enough to spark a lot of outrage. What was the fallout like after that letter went viral? So there

was two waves to it. The first wave was people being like, holy sh it, this is all full Oh

my god. And there was a lot of people in Silicon Valley who were like, whoa, this is huge, Like the fact that someone said something about Yelp paying minimum wage in like to work in San Francisco, one of the most expensive cities in the country, that this is a whistleblower, and then about four days later, conservative media started to pick up on it because their crusty asses are always late, and that was when they were like, oh, she's entitled, Like who does she think she is? Demanding

living wage? Who does she think she is? The responses were really personal and angry. Talia Jane shows that she has a lot to learn about adulthood. One headline sneered Talia Jane. She was a Yelp employee. She went on medium dot com where this blog post basically calling out the CEO and being yeah, blaming the company that is actually the one that's paying her bills allowing her to function. One of the most popular responses was by Stephanie Williams.

She wrote the Tali lect work ethic and that if only she had hustled harder, like getting a second job in the service industry like she did, she could have pulled herself up by her bootstraps. Her response made a lot of assumptions about Talia's life, like how she was probably able to get support from her family, but in reality that wasn't really an option. Tal you head After her response to Talio went viral, Williams did a series

of TV interviews about Talia and entitled Millennials. Here's williams segment from Fox News called the Osification of America. The whole thing kind of sounded very Dickens esque, like I am so poor, Oh my god, I'm so poor. But when I got to the end and I realized that she had included a link to her Venmo account and a PayPal account asking for people to help her to pay rent, I just sat there and was like, you

have got to be kidding me. After doing a media circuit about Talia, Williams successfully sold a TV show, writing on Medium that her viral rebuttal about Talia's lack of work ethic had been quote her golden ticket. Well, the thing that I had trouble with is that she was, you know, listening all the ways that she worked hard, but she was also putting it in the context of privileges that I don't have access to. Um, she was

living at home when she was working. She when she lost a job, she was able to move back home. Those were not options that I had. I, like I said, like my grandparents were like all right, Sea, Like I couldn't. I didn't have a home where I could share the financial burden while getting myself in line. You know, the response is to Talia's letter calling her lazy and entitled or a woose reveal a big problem about how we talk about poverty and work in America. It isn't is

about individual choices. Are people, and while it's great that some folks were able to hustle hard enough out of tough situations, if someone is working a full time job, they should make a wage they can actually live on. And it's not entitled to expect this in America. You're not being a wolf by simply posing the question of whether things could be better and having to work multiple jobs just to get by isn't a badge of honor.

It's a sign that something larger is a miss. Obviously, you should not need to work multiple jobs to survive. The minimum wage when it was created was was enough to cover a family of three, that's two adults and a child. Today it cannot cover a single person by themselves working full time, and that is the thing that we should be discussing. It's not you as an individual are failing. It's the system does not want you to succeed.

We'll be right back and We're back. After her letter, people cone Callia social media to prove she wasn't struggling as much as she said she was. They found pictures like ones of her eating a homemade roast or ones of her using facial scrub to suggest she was exaggerating her financial situation. That, too, reveals a big problem with

how poverty is framed. It doesn't always look how you might think, and we've made it seem like it's justified to question the financial choices of someone who's poor, and we expect that someone who's poor should project that poverty at all times. You can't be poor and have an iPhone or a laptop, or nice nails, or eat the occasional good meal. And in the age of social media, the problem gets even trickier. Everyone knows the reality we present on Instagram is better than the one we actually live.

So is it reasonable to judge someone's financial situation on what's essentially they're digital highlight reel? So I think an important thing that people don't realize is that when you're struggling financially, you have a limited number of ways that you can release stress to help you get through it. And for a lot of people that might be drinking or um, you know, going to the beach or experiencing something beautiful as an escape from the ugliness of your

day to day. For me, it's cooking, like I made these Bang and Ask cupcakes from scratch with like candied lime slices or something like like, and it was a joyous thing for me to be able to escape all the other stuff. So that way then I can take a breath and get back into it. And when we look at these things and say, oh, well, you're not really struggling, we have to consider the fact that people

need outlets to get through ship. On top of that, social media, we every single person curates their social media to appear better than it is. You never see someone posting a picture of their infant with a huge diaper blowout screaming their face off, even though that happens. You only ever see those little babies looking cute and drubic, right, Like, we tailor our social media to present a better version of our lives. And this happens throughout the you know,

the financial spectrum. What it boils down to is why do you feel the need to police other people? Like? Why? Also, like, why do you need a ton of context to justify someone's experience. Like I had a picture of a oven roast that I made and people said that it was state and I'm like, no, you're just being a cliche. I'm not making fucking steak and lobster. It was an oven roast. It costs like seven dollars, and someone else

purchased it for me to cook for us. But I'm not going to put that context on social media because if my family and friends found out that other people were buying food because I couldn't afford a seven dollar roast,

then it's going to be like a huge thing. And I didn't want my family to be worried about me because they don't have the resources to help me, and they would just feel really bad that I was struggling, and I didn't want to put that on them, Like it's just it's just ridiculous, like these assumptions of of uh feigning poverty or feigning excess or like anything like that.

Like who gives a ship if someone on food stamps wants to buy themselves steak in lobster, because that steak in lobsters the first meal, first real meal that they've eaten. That makes them feel human after months of struggle and houselessness and all these different things. If they want to do that, that's their prerogative. They're a grown up. You're

a grown up. Act like one. I feel like we're all most people that I know, even people who are pretty comfortable, are all like one or two calamitous things from not being so comfortable. And I knew someone who was living pretty comfortably and then, like many folks, lost their job, and then like many folks lost their health insurance, and then like many folks had a health emergency. When

that person was doing comfortably. Their car was an older and earlier model BMW, but so many people were like, I can't believe you d have a BMW and you're on you're on with for the baby, you're on food stamps. And she was like, what am I supposed to do? Sell my car to make you all feel better about me being on food stamps in the government at distance? Like, how would that make sense? For? Like, how is that

a choice that makes sense? Maybe the point of the matter is that, like it's not really your business to make sure that I have what you assume to be the trappings of poverty. To be you know, adequately broke down enough that I deserve to eat. I deserve you know, government assistance or what have you. We have this like really fucked up. I feel like it probably has roots in that bullshit thing of the welfare queen. I feel like it has roots in that where you have to

kind of present yourself. You have to put on like a performance of your struggle for people to believe it's real. You're not allowed to have acrylics or nice hair. You're not allowed to have, you know, in fashion clothes or things that fit you comfortably and that are clean. You can't have any of these things. You have to be like dirty, grimy, tattered clothes. Like you have to put on this charade for people to be like, oh, yeah, you really are struggling. I've been saying all of these things.

But unless I'm doing the song dance to make you think that, you're like to make you believe my reality, it's somehow like, oh, well, what's your personal fault, Like, what's your failing? Like if you have a laptop, you're not poor, like most people in the US have a laptop. Also, it's not that hard to purchase a laptop and then put it on credit and you're paying like a small amount every single month. It's not hard to purchase an iPhone, and every single month you're only paying a month to

pay off that phone. Like you don't see all of the other debts that go into just like maintaining an existence in modern society. But because you're seeing the aspects of existing in modern society, you're just going to assume that people are faking it. Like I don't need to walk out of nineteen thirty two for you to believe that I am depressed because it was like, you know,

the Great Depression. Um, thank you for that context you Like, I don't need I shouldn't need to be like Sepia, toned and dusty and like with dingy dirty nails for you to recognize that earning a minimum wage is not a living wage? Right? Why do I need to live in a shack out in the middle of the woods for you to believe that my struggling is valid? Like we have to, really, I think, examine our biases when it comes to what poverty looks like, well pab sounds like,

and what poverty feels like. Because so many people they assume certain types of people are poor. They assume they are poor in certain types of way and that there's nothing that can be done because it's their own personal failing. And it's just like a big funk you to all that,

because it couldn't be further from the truth. These are systemic issues that need systemic fixes, and one of the best ways to get started on a systemic fix is to recognize your internal personal adherents and enabling of that system and to uncouple yourself from it, you know, and then you go through and be like, oh, I now realize that even though I'm not struggling as hard as someone in the third world country, my struggles are valid. Or I realized that my income does not reflect my value,

and I recognize that your income doesn't reflect your value. Yeah, So, like, there's so much that we can uncouple in ourselves, and when we do that, we are able to remove the power that these systems have over us and demand better. But if we don't do that, it's not going to

get better. Two months after hitting published on our open letter, tell You a Story faded from the headlines, and for as many media outlets rand pieces about entitled millennials like Tell You, much fewer followed up on the story and the fact that tell You was actually right and that her letter triggered real change, not only to tell you, I get people talking and thinking about the living wage.

Two months after her letter, Yelped increased pay from twelve to fourteen dollars, They increase the number of paid time off to is from five to thirteen, and they had eleven paid holidays, up from their previous number of zero. Even though a Yelled representative told Recode that the company did agree with many of the points in her letter, Yelp still says these changes had nothing to do with her, and that they were already in the works. Do you

think this was in response to your letter? Absolutely? Um, they'll never tell you that. So here's the thing is that, Um, the city of San Francisco had previously enacted a thing where the minimum wage was set to increase up to fifteen dollars by uh I think or something like that. So no matter what, they would have had to raise the wages, but that first bump would have been much less, and it wasn't going to go into effect until June.

So they raise wages more than the bump that they needed to, and prior too, they needed to do it, and then they're going to go ahead and claim that it wasn't because of me, when at the same time as my letter was going viral, the customer support managers were having one on one meetings with all of the customer support staff to gauge how they were feeling and to basically try and prevent a mutiny. And workers were like, yeah,

it is fucked. I'm working full time, I should be making a living wage, and they were like, oh, we need to do some changes real quick, and then that's when they rolled it out like it's obvious. They're never going to admit it, but it's obvious. Do you feel vindicated. No, because the amount that they raised or like the amount that they increased it, it's still not a living wage. The workers that are working for these tech companies are

still not earning a living wage. The rental costs in they area is still unlivable, and there's still all this stupid like Nimby in fighting against building housing and capping rental prices and all of these toxic things occurring in the Bay Area. So people are still struggling. You know, I do feel like it's like, yeah, I was right, but also the fight continues, like we're not done yet, morn after this quick break, let's get back to it. In the last few weeks, workers across industries have been

speaking at against unfair, racist, toxic work environments. After Matt Hunzie at the food publication Bone Appetite tweeted about racist workplace practices within the organization, he was put on leave. Tally is happy to see more workers, you know, they don't have to keep quiet when something bad is happening at their job. Every time I see an and letter,

I'm like, yeah, you're welcome. Like I remember when Medium posted like an app update and they in their in their debug log, they called it an open letter to Medium users talking about talking about like what the update included, and I'm like, my legacy. But I do feel like people I was. I was early, but I was also right on time, I think because obviously I spoke up in a very loud and a very um indignant and like direct way, which you know you don't usually see.

You see like leaks from people, uh speaking to media off the record or whatever it is, in this sort of like closed door method to get the information out there. And instead I was like funk that I just got all hip post and I think it might not be direct, but I think that I did get caught like the early part of people realizing that they have the capacity to use their own voice and say this stuff out

loud directly. Um. I'm hesitant to say that I was the originator of that, but I do think that people can look at it what I said and be like, I can do this, but in like a less sarcastic way, and and then and they do it, you know, like like Hunsie went on, um, you know Matt Hunsie, I for b A. He was like, yeah, stuff is racist and bad things are bad here. And then they were like, oh, we're putting him on paid leave. And he's like, look,

they're so afraid of people just saying the thing. But if you just say the thing, then it's out there and people have to uh reconcile with it. If you don't say it, who will, you know. I think a lesson that a lot of people take for me is like, oh, you have to be really scared of like your social media presence and like whatever you post on there, and it's like, who gives a ship? I make beautiful cupcakes, and I say stuff that needs to be said, Like, just say it if it needs to be said, put

it out there. If you're scared of blowback, do it anyway. You're gonna have people who are going to come out of the woodwork and be like hell yes, you know, like the risk that we create in our minds being afraid of like uh, like you know, like for me, I obviously am still working low wage jobs. Um, but that's like I I used to see it as like a punishment, like, oh, I'm never going to have a good job because I did this thing and I'm and now I'm like there are no good job. I don't care.

I did the things you say, the thing through the thing that's it. So thinking about organizations like Uber and Amazon and insta Car, you know they're fueled by working people, but yet those same people don't really have a loud voice in the conversation about those same companies. So what could what can we like, how can we make sure that we're meaningfully centering those voices um in conversations about about things like Uber and Amazon and insta Car. Pay

them to write the articles about the companies. We just have people who you know, went to journalism school, contacting workers and asking them questions that other like that journalists are thinking of, but that other workers aren't necessarily like, the workers know the problem more than a journalist asking

questions does um. I saw, especially among COVID reporting early on, so much of the coverage would detail how hard it was at a company for low wage workers, and then every single quote from workers boiled down to essentially quote like I'm frustrated and scared, and then there was no

deeper dive. The best thing I have seen, like, the best article I've seen about workers in COVID was written by an mt A worker who had the piece published, I think in the Washington Post, and they wrote about the terror of seeing people that they saw every day just vanish and die, and like, these are things that you are seeing as you're working in it, and you're able to mediate like and like think on these things as you're experiencing them. The journalist is just popping into

a space and being like, Hey, how's it going good? No, Dad, okay, and then like that's their story. If you want to see these stories reflected accurately, pay the people who live them to write about it. Get a good editor who doesn't mind spending a little bit more time and nurture the story. Don't take their voices and put it into your mouth and then speak for them. If you knew now all the things are going to happen, if you published a letter, would you would you do it again?

That's it? Yes, I mean it's it's the trolley problem, right, would you, uh sacrifice one to save a hundred? Yeah, I don't mind If I'm the one, that's fine. And I mean I've definitely still had issues. But the further way I get from it, the more obvious it is that, uh, socially and culturally, whether people realize it or not, if they were to go back and read my letter today, they'd be like, oh, yeah, obviously, Uh, like we've we've moved into a place where what I wrote is, like,

it's not controversial anymore. Tell you us right, For all the hate she got for her letter, by a wide margin, Americans say they favor raising the federal minimum wage. Two thirds of Americans support raising the minimum wage to fifteen an hour, including who say they strongly favor that kind of increase, according to a twenty nineteen Pew Research Center survey. So we'll tell you to be remembered as someone who was an early adopter that most people now agree with.

Do you think that you'll be remembered as a whiney, entitled millennial or someone who amplified the conversation around living wages and actually made tangible change. I think both. You know, Senator Ben Sas in his book he called me an entitled millennial, and that book is going to be on shelves, you know, and certain people are going to choose to read that. He said, Um, what was this quote? Uh?

The founding fathers would panic at the survivability of the nation if we were to have too many ms Janes. Think about that. A sitting senator says that there were too many people like tell you, our country might not have been able to survive. But what she did was actually see a problem in her country, and at great risk her own comfort and stability, asked why couldn't it be better? What's more patriotic than that? If you're looking for ways to support the show, check out our work

store at tangodi dot com. Flash Store. Got a story about an interesting thing in tech, or just want to say hi. You can reach us at Hello at tangodi dot com. You can also find transcripts for today's episode at tangodi dot com. There Are No Girls on the Internet was created by me Bridget pad It's a production of iHeart Radio and Unboss Creative edited by Joey pat Jonathan Strickland as our executive producer. Terry Harrison is our

produc and sound engineer. Michael Amata was our contributing producer. I'm your host, Bridget Todd. If you want to help us grow, rate and review us on Apple Podcasts. For more podcasts from iHeart Radio, check out the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.