About 30 workers at tech giant Meta were dismissed last week for misusing the tech giant’s meal voucher system, such as using it to buy toothpaste, wine glasses and washing powder.
The firm, which owns Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram, dismissed the employees, some of whom were on six-figure salaries, from its Los Angeles offices.
Some of those dismissed had shared vouchers or used them to have food delivered at home.
Separately, the company has cut jobs across the business.
Meta staff at smaller office locations are given $25 (£19) for lunch, $20 for breakfast, and $25 for dinner in vouchers which are meant to be used for ordering food from Grubhub, a US subsidiary of Just Eat Takeaway.
At its largest offices, such as its Silicon Valley HQ, Meta feeds staff for free from its canteens.
An anonymous Meta employee posted information about the sackings on the work social message board Blind. They said that the staff who were dismissed “were given a warning to stop which most of them did, but were still fired three months later even after stopping.”
Other posters repeated the claim the staff were warned, though another reportedly wrote there were no warnings.
Meta and other Silicon Valley companies have for several years offered free food in their offices. This is seen as an incentive to come into the office instead of working from home, or in the case of breakfast and dinner, to encourage longer working hours.
The dismissals over perks came as Meta launched a restructuring plan that will see redundancies and the relocation of staff from its WhatsApp and Instagram divisions and its augmented reality arm, Reality Labs.
A Meta spokesman said: “Today, a few teams at Meta are making changes to ensure resources are aligned with their long-term strategic goals and location strategy.
“This includes moving some teams to different locations, and moving some employees to different roles. In situations like this when a role is eliminated, we work hard to find other opportunities for impacted employees.”
The company made about 21,000 redundancies in 2022 and 2023, leaving it with about 70,799 staff at the end of June this year.
Other big tech companies, many of which have been reducing numbers of staff, have also been cracking down on employee perks with Google scaling back free snacks and workout classes, and reducing the amount of office equipment.
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