Last week, Meta, a tech giant, fired 30 employees for using its meal voucher system to purchase toothpaste, wine glasses, and washing powder.
The Los Angeles office of the firm that owns Facebook and WhatsApp, as well as Instagram, has dismissed employees who were earning six-figure salaries.
Some of the dismissed people had used vouchers to share food or have it delivered to their homes.
Separately the company has reduced jobs in all areas of the business.
Meta employees at smaller offices are given $25 vouchers (PS19), $20 for breakfast and $25 for dinner. These vouchers are to be used when ordering food through Grubhub, the US subsidiary of Just Eat Takeaway.
Meta provides free meals to its staff in its biggest offices, including its Silicon Valley headquarters.
A Meta employee anonymously posted the information on the Blind message board. The staff members who were fired “were warned to stop, which most did. But they were still terminated three months after stopping.”
Some posters repeated that the staff had been warned. However, another poster claimed there had not been any warnings.
Meta and other Silicon Valley firms have been offering free food at their offices for many years. The free food is offered as a way to encourage employees to work in the office rather than from home.
Meta announced a restructuring plan which will result in redundancies, relocations of staff and staff members from its WhatsApp division and Instagram division as well as its augmented-reality arm Reality Labs.
Meta’s spokesman stated: “Today a few Meta teams are making changes in order to align resources with their long-term goals and location strategies.
This includes moving teams to new locations and changing the roles of some employees. When a position is eliminated in situations such as this, we try to find new opportunities for the employees affected.
In 2022 and 2023 the company will make about 21,000 layoffs, leaving about 70,799 employees at the end June of this year.
Google has reduced the number of free office supplies and exercise classes and also cut back on snacks.
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