Meta has fired employees for misusing a meal credit system to buy household items, according to the Financial Times. The system allowed Meta workers at the Los Angeles office to use a $25-a-day voucher for the delivery service Grubhub to deliver meals to them at the office, however some were reportedly using it to pick up unrelated items like wine glasses and acne pads, or to deliver food to somewhere other than the office.
Like many tech giants, it is not unusual for Meta’s offices to have their own food courts as part of their office complexes (like they do in San Francisco and Manhattan), offering relatively high-end dining options free of charge to their employees. The voucher system, which offered $20 for breakfast and $25 for lunch and dinner, was meant to be a workaround for office locations that do not have such facilities built-in, like their Los Angeles branch.
Some employees took to the app Blind, a social media platform that verifies users’ identities and employment but keeps them anonymous, to vent their frustrations about the firings. One Meta employee on the platform claimed that some workers fired over the vouchers were “given a warning to stop which most of them did, but were still fired 3 months later even after stopping.” The employee went on to call Meta’s practices in this regard “egregious.”
The firings come as Meta continues to undergo a broader restructuring, with positions eliminated across a number of Meta’s portfolio, including Instagram, Whatsapp, Facebook and Reality Labs, the team responsible tech giant’s VR platform and metaverse. A Meta spokesperson stated that the different companies under its control were “making changes to ensure resources are aligned with their long-term strategic goals and location strategy.” The statement did not specify how many positions had been eliminated, nor how many were related to the voucher system.
Meta has so far eliminated over 21,000 jobs over the past year as the company has faced declining revenues and disappointing user growth. The past month has shown some positive signs with the unveiling of its Orion augmented-reality glasses, which drew some investors back to the company. Although this is a marked shift in direction after the company’s as-of-yet failed bid at the metaverse, an online shared virtual reality space, which has cost the company $45 billion since 2021.
