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There are reports that Meta laid off 30 staffers in its Los Angeles office, one of the smaller offices of the Facebook parent company, and it is being reported the employees making over six figures were laid off for exploiting/abusing a perk which appears tantamount to workplace theft.
For starters, the current Meta market cap is $1.46 TRILLION so it is easy to dismiss a few bucks here or there as ‘why would they care?’ but at the end of the day, if the reports are true then what appeared to be happening is nothing more than theft.
The Guardian and Telegraph report that ‘around 30 staffers’ were fired for abusing $25 meal vouchers that were intended to be used for lunches at work. It is being claimed they were using those meal vouchers to buy personal items for home like wine glasses, laundry detergent, and toothpaste.
One of the employees fired for abusing this the $25 credit was making over $400,000 a year in salary… Imagine getting fired from your $400K/year job with some of the best perks on earth all because you wanted to use your $25 lunch credit to buy some cheap wine glasses or toothpaste… Yikes.
At the other Meta offices (the larger offices) in Menlo Park, San Francisco, Dublin, New York, and others, there are ‘cafeterias’ where employees are treated to incredible free meals for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. It’s an incredible perk and one that is offered by all top employers. I heard from a friend years ago at Google that they had lobster as an option at the NYC office at times.
The dark side/flip side of this perk is that it is designed to keep employees at the office for longer and thus, more productive. Time spent away from the office at lunch is time that could have been used working.
All of that said, I respect the move from Meta and/or Zuck (if he knew) to lay off these employees for stealing $25 a pop because it has quite literally nothing to do with the money itself, it’s about abuse/theft/disrespecting the company.
Meta earned approximately $369 million/day each day in 2023. If you break down the personal wealth numbers, Mark Zuckerberg himself is believed to earn around $230.6 million every single day. So yeah, it is absolutely not about the money. Mark could give EVERYONE in America $25 (330 million Americans), which would add up to around $8,250,000,000, and he would still be the 4th richest person on planet earth.
Let that sink in!
Pretty much every major publication I’ve seen discuss this news about Meta’s laid off staffers mentions previous layoffs and it needs to 100% be said this is not that, at all. It is believed employees were found to be using a credit designed to hook them up with free lunch to buy wine glasses and toothpaste.
This isn’t ‘downsizing’ and one would think those roles will need to be filled. This is signaling that just because they are insanely successful it doesn’t mean they can be taken advantage of, especially not from within.
Rules are rules. It doesn’t matter how big a company is. If you’re biting the hand that feeds you, you gotta go.