INQUISITR.COM / News & Politics

Yelp Employee and Single Mom Fired For Visiting Boyfriend In The ICU

By Anne Sewell
Published on: 03:22 PST, Mar 6, 2016

A single mother and Yelp employee just lost her job for spending time with her boyfriend in the ICU, where he was suffering from a brain bleed. The Yelp review website isn’t getting good reviews itself from people who have heard the story.

Jaymee Senigaglia lives in the California Bay area and recently headed to Medium to tell her story. The Yelp employee claimed that when she asked if she could spend time caring for her injured boyfriend in the intensive care unit, her boss fired her.

In her Medium story, she wrote that she is a single mother who, while in the ICU visiting her boyfriend, received a phone call from her “manager, director and HR” to tell her to come into work right now or resign.

Senigaglia wrote, “When I said I needed some time and this is all traumatic with caring for my boyfriend they told me that I would need to make a decision by noon and if I didn’t come in or resign, they would terminate me. In tears I said OK and hung up.”

Once the article was up on the Internet and people were commenting on it, reportedly the San Francisco-based Yelp online review site was quick to respond. They said in a statement on Twitter that Senigaglia was laid off due to repeated absences from her employment, to be exact, “10 of her 59 work days with Yelp.”

Yelp went on to say the company “provided multiple documented warnings and ongoing performance counseling specifically related to reliability and attendance issues.” They ended their report by adding, “Sadly, this role was just not a good fit. We wish her the best.”

Senigaglia is not the first employee who has publicly complained about Yelp and how the company treats its employees. As previously mentioned by the Inquisitr, a couple of weeks ago, another Yelp employee wrote an open letter to Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman via the same writing platform, saying her pay (which is reportedly $8.15 an hour after taxes) barely covers her rent in the California Bay area.

Using the pseudonym Talia Jane, the Yelp employee said she hadn’t been able to afford groceries since starting her job with the online review company and was basically living off a large bag of rice. That employee was fired two hours after posting the open letter.

Senigaglia, working as an associate at $2,000 per month, addressed Talia Jane in her Medium post, saying, “I am the single mother #Yelp just fired for asking for an unpaid 3 day leave of absence to care for my boyfriend in the ICU. #yelpcares”

As reported by the Business Insider, the single mother went on to give details about how difficult her life is as a single mother of a 3-year-old child and that she had to take out a loan at 300 percent interest just to be able to move to the Bay Area and start her employment at Yelp.

The Yelp employee then went on to outline her strong commitment to her new job, saying, “I am the single mother who closed her 1st deal on her first pitch on her first day on the phones in Yelp Sales Training.”

She then went on to outline how she closed two deals while suffering from a fever during the winter break while her co-workers took time off and outlined other aspects of the hard work she has performed for Yelp.

However, it was when Senigaglia’s boyfriend was injured in a mountain bike accident and ended up in the ICU with a brain bleed last month that things came to a head. She said she talked to her manager about visiting her boyfriend and thought Yelp “had her back” because she worked so hard for the company. It seems they didn’t.

While some people who commented on her post were fully supportive of Senigaglia, others did say it was irresponsible to take out a loan at 300 percent interest.

[Photo via Flickr by Dan Ox/CC BY-SA 2.0]

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