Meta fires staff who abused $25 meal vouchers: report
Tech giant Meta reportedly fired roughly two dozen staffers based in Los Angeles for abusing the company's $25 meal vouchers to purchase non-food household items.
The Financial Times reported that Meta fired the workers last week after the company discovered that the workers were abusing its food credit system by using the funds to buy other household items, ranging from acne pads and wine glasses to laundry detergent.
According to the report, Meta staff are given daily allowances of $20 for breakfast, $25 for lunch and another $25 for dinner — similar perks to what other large tech companies offer workers on top of their typical compensation packages.
Meta employees who were fired had been abusing the system for a long period of time, in some cases pooling their money together or having meals sent home when the company intended for the credits to be used at the office, the FT reported, citing a person familiar with the matter. They added that workers who broke the food voucher rules only occasionally received a reprimand but weren't fired.
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The FT reviewed a post on the anonymous messaging platform Blind, in which a former Meta staffer, who indicated that they had a salary of about $400,000 at the tech giant, said they had used the $25 meal credits to purchase groceries like toothpaste and tea at the Rite Aid pharmacy.
The staffer said in the post that they admitted to misusing the credits when Meta's human resources department began investigating the practice, and that they were later fired unexpectedly, saying it was "surreal," according to the report.
FOX Business reached out to Meta for comment.
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Meta — the parent company of Facebook and Instagram — has been on a restructuring push the last few years, and the FT reported that the tech giant is also in the midst of a fresh round of layoffs and changes to some of its teams.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced in November 2022 that Meta was laying off more than 11,000 workers, and followed that up with another round of layoffs that affected 10,000 workers in the spring of 2023 during what he dubbed the "Year of Efficiency."
Earlier this year, Zuckerberg said the layoffs weren't due to the emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) but rather because Meta, like other tech companies, had invested heavily during the COVID era e-commerce surge and "overbuilt" as a result.
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"I think across the economy, a lot of companies just kind of overbuilt, and then when things went back to pretty close to exactly what they were the way before... I think a lot of companies realized, 'Hey, we're kind of not in a good financial place because we overbuilt,'" Zuckerberg told hosts Neal Freyman and Toby Howell on the "Morning Brew Daily" podcast.
FOX Business' Daniella Genovese contributed to this report.