"Facebook worker living in garage to Zuckerberg: challenges are right outside your door", 24 Jul 2017

Mark Zuckerberg’s travels throughout the United States to fulfill his 2017 “personal challenge” to “learn about people’s hopes and challenges” have seen him...speak out against the staggering wealth inequality that his $68.5bn fortune so clearly represents. But to Nicole, a worker in one of Facebook’s cafeterias, they have also raised an important question: “Is he going to come here?” “Here” is just a few miles from Zuckerberg’s five-house compound in Palo Alto and mere blocks from Facebook’s sprawling Menlo Park headquarters [where] Nicole and her husband Victor, who also works at a Facebook cafeteria, live in a two-car garage with their [three] children... “He doesn’t have to go around the world,” said Nicole. “He should learn what’s happening in this city.”... Working at a Facebook cafeteria is an enviable job in many ways... [Both Nicole and Victor earn] well above the $15 an hour minimum for contractors that Facebook established in 2015. But in a region where software engineers earning four times as much complain about “trying to make ends meet”, the family is struggling... They frequently struggle to find enough money for basics like food and clothes for their children... A spokeswoman for Facebook said none of the company’s contingent or contract workers have access to facilities such as clinics, gyms, or bring-your-child-to-work days, but that other policies were a matter between the contractor and the workers... On Friday, the couple were among about 500 Facebook cafeteria workers who elected to join a union, Unite Here Local 19. They are the latest group of tech industry service workers to seek unionization in the hopes of achieving a better standard of living. Neither Facebook nor the food service contractor, Flagship Facility Services, opposed the union drive.