> That included one unnamed worker on a $400,000 salary, who said they had used their meal credits to buy household goods and groceries such as toothpaste and tea.
It's official. There are some perks that are better in relatively "shithole" countries than in Elysium. In that universe, they put allowance money on your food card that is mostly accepted by certain restaurants. But there are a few supermarkets that accept it as well and you're completely free to use the card "wherever it's accepted".
This facebook example by contrast is hilarious bean counting partnering with moronic principles.
And where is the quote from the person that bought toothpaste at the request of a homeless person? I'd like to be in the HR office for that conversation.
>Who cares? Have you seen the profit margins at these stingy-ass companies?
Should stealing be excused just because you're doing it to some wealthy entity?
The problem with the "it's OK to steal from them because they're in a position of privilege and I'm not" justification logic, is that then the poor/homeless guy around the block should also be ok to rob you or break into your car because "who cares, have you seen the fat wages those techies are raking in?"
Have Meta done a lot of nasty stuff that they should be punished for? Definitely. But that's another topic they need to be held accountable for by the law, and should never be a justification to green light stealing since two wrongs don't make a right and you don't want to live in a society where stealing is normalized as long as you think you're doing it to someone more priviledged than you.
How convenient that that line of thinking's ultimate outcome is to solidify the security of the haves goods over the have nots access to what they need. Much like taking second servings before the children have had their fill.
Funny bit is no one ever seems to want to contemplate how to defang the power laws that yield winner takes all, fostering massive inequality at the expense of the majority of the population.
That'd make being rich harder though. No one wants that.
Its not stealing they gave them the money, in the form of the voucher, they just didnt like what they were using the voucher for or the way they were using it (on the way out of the office).
> Should stealing be excused just because you're doing it to some wealthy entity?
Absolutely!
> The problem with the "it's OK to steal from them because they're in a position of privilege and I'm not" justification logic, is that then the poor/homeless guy around the block should also be ok to rob you or break into your car because "who cares, have you seen the fat wages those techies are raking in?"
False equivalence. But also, I'm absolutely ok with this.
> Have Meta done a lot of nasty stuff that they should be punished for? Definitely. But that's another topic they need to be held accountable for by the law, and should never be a justification to green light stealing since two wrongs don't make a right and you don't want to live in a society where stealing is normalized as long as you think you're doing it to someone more priviledged than you.
I'm completely fine with this world.
Hilariously, you could have made this argument a lot better by indicating perception of privilege is subjective. But you didn't—and instead only produced examples that should be ok to anyone with an ounce of morality.
People love free stuff just as much as they love spending money I guess. There are deals even in upscale stores for brands used by people who don't know how much money and how many properties they own.
Not sure how it works in the US, but at least here, if an employer wants to provide meals to some employees and not have it seemed to be a benefit in kind (and thus liable for income tax), they have to provide them to _all_ employees (or at least all employees working at a given site).
I'd wonder if that was part of the issue here, actually; are these sorts of meal vouchers treated specially for tax in the US?
I have only worked at pretty bad startups I guess, but for me I could get paid well but if there is some strong sense of job insecurity (as there always seems to be in this world), I will never leave a certain level of survival/hoarding mode. I have savings and everything but to this day I will still only buy a car I can potentially live out of. Every day I am ready to go back to the kitchen, but until then every morsel must be collected and appreciated.
This is (depending on how extreme you are, I suppose) wise. Once you're making more than a subsistence income, one of the keys to long-term financial stability and security is to live well below your means[1].
Doing that also gives you freedom in the sense that you are no longer "trapped" in whatever job you have, because you can develop a long enough runway that you can leave a job before you've found a replacement.
[1] In my youth, I dated the daughter of one of the richest people in my city. I asked him what the key to getting rich is, and his response was "spend less than you earn". At the time, I thought it was a way to to avoid answering my question, but in the decades since I've realized that was actually the correct answer and everything else is just expanding on that.
> Meta [...] usually feeds staff for free from canteens at its larger offices, including its sprawling Silicon Valley headquarters. But those at smaller sites are given daily credits to order food through delivery services such as UberEats and Grubhub. Daily allowances include $20 for breakfast, $25 for lunch and $25 for dinner.
So probably a perk they decided was worth it or necessary for morale at some point
> So probably a perk they decided was worth it or necessary for morale at some point
I always thought that stuff (along with the snacks) was a ploy to keep employees working longer hours. Needing to get food/coffee/whatever is a transition that can allow people to decide to disengage from work. A strategically placed coffee station can prevent a longer trip to the cafeteria or a coffee shop, and free food in the cafeteria can prevent a trip offsite to a restaurant or the worker's home for a meal. Plus it can seem like a plus to the employee, because people often pay a lot more attention to money than time.
Of course it is. That doesnt mean it isnt also a perk. I am happy that my office has coffee even though it also benefits my employer with the increased productivity. Same with lunch, its a win win for the company and the employee.
> Same with lunch, its a win win for the company and the employee.
I don't think it's that simple. Sure, on some level it's a win for you (free food) and a win for them (more time spent working), but on another level you might be winning more if the perk wasn't influencing your decision-making to take the employer-preferred path.
I think it's a little more clear when thinking about employer provided dinner, like Facebook apparently provides.
I don't think it's a win for the employee if they're getting $100 worth of extra labor out of you in exchange for $25 worth of food. And not just financially, I always thought that these "perks" make it harder to disconnect and relax from work which is likely to take a toll on mental health - I know it would for me.
They buy some startup, bring them all under Meta's HR umbrella with all the rules and perks that comes with. Since these recently acquired guys are running out of random offices in random places they just give them a stipend rather than force them to all relocate to a campus with dining.
The $400k employee was probably a higher up (or key SME Meta felt they needed to put in golden handcuffs) at one of these acquired companies and was probably already on his or her way out.
At Meta, $400k would be high E4 or low E5. That’s someone earlier in their career who probably feels fairly anonymous and is used to taking all the deals they can get to live cheaply, even if they don’t need to anymore.
We use a Doordash voucher as an incentive to go hybrid and come into the office once or twice a week. Seems silly to spend all that time commuting and then you go leave for another 60-90 minutes to get lunch.
At some point it will disappear and go to a hard RTO, but for now it kind of works.
I've seen others ask how is buying toothpaste and wine is possible on a voucher, Doordash definitely does this "add groceries in the next 15 minutes!" thing once you've ordered lunch.
Unless they had one of those corporate bullshit jobs like diversity, inclusivity and sensitivity consultant, survey administrator, human resources, corporate compliance officer, task-master, etc.
If they had an engineering job that solves problems, they'll probably be OK.
Seems like a bad exchange for both the employee and the company. TBH I feel Meta could have just ended the program for these folks rather than flat out firing them.
I am almost sure that this employee in particular was not deemed especially important. If it was e.g.: an exec or some high level engineer, they would just be reprimand.
Do you imply the person didn't eat that day or what? The company compensates employees food expenses. The employee's partner made the food and thus the food can't be expended, so they bought something else at the equivalent price to compensate for what would otherwise be covered by the company.
I can't find a logic by which this is "stealing". Please clarify.
Right, so then the most optimal outcome is always buying food even if you don't need it, and perhaps even throwing the food away immediately. If your total comes out 22.00, then go ahead and buy 6 ranch dips and bring it up to 25.00.
Now, it's not stealing. Does this outcome feel more morally correct to you? I think, if you answer "no", then your logic on how this stealing works is faulty.
>If you value these employees so much that you pay them $400k/yr
A company isn't paying you X amount of money because it "values you", they pay you that because of the market forces that force them to pay you that amount of money. They'd gladly pay you nothing and crack a whip on your back if they could get away with it.
"Valuing you" is something your family will do, but rarely a company, especially a publicly traded one.
>be careful what message you want to send.
The message was exactly the one they wanted to send: "Everyone is expendable".
Because training employees is expensive & may not be obvious how the $ could be used. In the employee side it is a small % of total comp so it doesn’t make sense for them either.
It isn’t clear that they fired the employees to send a message. From the article, it doesn’t look like Meta told other employees, “we fired people who abused the free meal service,” so I don’t know how others would get the message. Instead it was posted on Blind and picked up by news which seems like a poor way to send a message from a PR perspective.
Whether or not they intended to send a message, if I work at the facebook the blaring loud message I just received is "do not under any circumstances try to expense anything, ever."
> the blaring loud message I just received is "do not under any circumstances try to expense anything, ever."
did you not read the article?
the message was, quite reasonably, "don't take the fucking piss, if we give you food vouchers to buy your dinner, then use it for buying yourself dinner".
It's an assumption, but groceries are food and I'm assuming the person just threw in toothpaste as well. And, apparently, that one dollar worth of toothpaste was too far.
I had to watch a video about this issue 20 years ago. If the company can't trust you with small amounts of money, they can't trust you at all. I've seen people forfeit bonuses over smaller infractions- the lesson is don't steal small amounts of money
Conditional money is goofy and essentially asking for problems.
Either give someone $20 or don’t. Then you don’t have to have an entire investigative department devoted to auditing whether an item has caloric value or not.
I still remember.As clear as day: I bought raw eggs and raw meat with my French equivalent "tickets resto", as well as a couple of beers. I am a horrible person. Granted, I was only being paid 2300€/month at that time.
Poor international companies providing me generous perks, and I.. I occupy the position of someone else who would be strictly abiding the rules. I should have been fired on the spot. If only the world were run by law abiding individuals like the ones running those generous companies
There's your mistake. Abusing the rules for personal gain is a privilege reserved for the rich and powerful. The commoners get the rule book thrown at them if they get caught stealing from their lords.
Most of these employees believe they're elite, they aren't.
The natural aristocrats are unaffected, not because they get away with abusing the system, but because they don't abuse them.
One has to be remarkably pathetic and morally bankrupt to abuse this in the first place. Meta is simply correcting their mistake of hiring a fundamentally unqualified peasant.
After reading your comment multiple times I can confidently state that the best thing about it is that I am still unsure if you're sarcastic, trolling or actually believe that
Let me rephrase for you what he meant: "If you steal, don't get caught."
The rich and powerful are simply much better at breaking the rules without getting caught, that's how they're rich, while the poor are usually not, that's why they stay poor.
It's also undisputably false, unless you exclude all the people that don't adhere to your thesis. But at that point, you're just grasping at straws and cannot admit to being wrong.
I.e. P Diddy as a very notorious recent example that was both rich and effectively powerful (how else would he have gotten away with it for decades) and has now crashed. The inverse exists as well, where people publicly commit crimes and get away with it, just because they can. Very frequent for politicians for example, I don't think you need specific examples for that?
Meal money in France is credited (either as vouchers or as a separate credit card-like card) that can only be spent either in restaurants, or to spend in supermarkets. Supermarkets are only allowed to sell a limited list of goods that qualify as meal on that credit, the system is directly integrated in the cash register software.
Why should it be limited to Meta? It benefits restaurants near workplaces and as a local government you want some closeness in location to reduce traffic and to increase spending and thus tax revenue.
There is quite a lot of missing context in this story.
Meta provides a $25 meal delivery credit for employees in offices that do not serve catered dinner. It is valid only within a specific time window on weekdays, and meals can only be delivered to the office.
The offense here is that employees were ordering items other than food, or not actually working at the time of delivery. Like they would order food to the office, go in to grab it, and then leave.
How does this whole thing works? Can they use the voucher for anything? When I get a grubhub voucher, I can not use it to purchase tooth paste, toilet paper, etc.
> The company had also reportedly become more stringent on office supplies including staplers and tape, with staff having to borrow items from their reception desks instead.
I’m sure Google can compute the cost of a $400,000/- a year employee traipsing down the hallway to borrow a stapler. Pretty sure the stapler will pay for itself in a few trips.
It happens often in very big companies. I remember multiple trips to different floors of a building to get the requisition form and authorization for a single notebook and pen that in the end cost the company ~$150. Someone has a KPI 'I cut down stationery costs by 12%', what the trade-off costs is someone else's problem entirely.
I knew someone who would take company products to lenient stores and "return" them for a refund >:( They worked in PR and had access to samples unquestioned
We had this at my company (finance) during covid they had a generous Uber eats offer for food after work hours. Some employees (particularly new grads) realised they could pick the food up as they left or collect the food at the door as they left the office or redirect the order. remember at the time thinking this is stealing pennies when you’re paid incredibly well.
Well it wasn’t pennies. HR filtered to find those who claimed thousands and then managed to prove many of them were ordering on days they hadn’t even swiped into the office. Anyway, when HR finally did look into it dozens of people got fired from their $n00,000 job for stealing $5,000 worth of food. Good to fire them, you don’t want to hire people that stupid.
It's incredible how often I've seen this. Same here--every single tech job, there's at least someone who does this. And it's always the same excuse/justification when you see them doing it: "The soda's free, bro! If they didn't want me to take it, they'd put it in a vending machine!"
My startup just fired a remote employee who was using our coworking space stipend to pay for her friends art studio rent. When asked for receipts, they got super defensive and the rest is history. For every person taking advantage of their companies generous perks, there is someone hard working and ethical willing to do that job. FAFO.
Yes, I get the feeling that there were likely other reasons why they wanted the employee gone, but needed a good reason that wouldn't result in a legal complaint.
Is it really an abuse? Oh no, he used meal credits to buy toothpaste and tea instead of food, so... what? It really irks me that this level of pettiness comes from the corporation that itself uses every single tax "optimization" scheme on earth (and also probably invented a couple). Apparently, quod licet Metae non licet famulo. This really is just a small monetary enhancement to one's wage, not a "we ration out your approved caloric intake separately; do not mess with its accounting — or else" system (although it seems Meta really would like to treat it like that).
> This really is just a small monetary enhancement to one's wage
The IRS doesn’t view it that way — if people were just given an extra $70 a day for expenses not related to their job, it would typically to be taxed as compensation.
If they allowed this to happen unchecked and lots of people started doing it, the headline would be “Meta facilitates tax avoidance scheme for employees making $400k”
This is my feeling as well. I've gone through a lot of grief on expense reports at my company for things like not reporting the tax on a hotel room or tip on a meal receipt separately from everything else. It's not as simple as $25, at least from an accounting perspective.
The expense report minefield is real. It's why I developed the habit decades ago of not expensing anything unless it's actually expensive. It's too much hassle and risk.
So then it must be a better outcome if you buy the maximum allowed amount of food, 70 dollars, and then throw it away? Better yet, buy that food, attempt to pawn it off, and then buy toothpaste.
To me, that feels like a much worse outcome, not a better one. I think this demonstrates you need some leniency in these things. Because pettiness breeds pettiness.
I'm not speaking to the point - I'm speaking to right and wrong.
If it's wrong to use it on a tube of toothpaste because that's stealing, then it must surely be right to instead buy the maximum food and throw it away. Therefore, people should do that.
If that sounds wrong to you, then the initial assumption might not be correct. Maybe it's not so bad to buy the tube of toothpaste.
Constraining yourself to extremely hard and fast rules seems like a good idea on the surface. But it's all about incentives. I can easily make the company bleed much more money while being within their rules. So why even bother?
A touch of leniency and common sense goes a long way.
In what way the mega corp X is defrauded here, exactly? The sibling comment explains that arguably the IRS can be considered defrauded in this case, but the mega corp itself?
I bet that was really worth it...