June Jiuxing Xie: 'Budget Eats' star reveals she was fired for rejecting deal for TV version of YouTube hit
NEW YORK CITY, NEW YORK: Media juggernaut Hearst sacked a woman who appeared in a well-liked YouTube show recently. The woman said that she was fired in retaliation, while the corporation characterized her as insubordinate and abusive. June Jiuxing Xie, 33, claimed that she was let go for actively participating in a developing union after she rose to recognition as the host of the popular series ‘Budget Eats’ produced by Hearst's food brand Delish.
‘Budget Eats’ was offered the chance to become an A&E Networks TV show but Xie claims she turned it down because she didn't "feel comfortable engaging in this project she was "to be on Hearst's payroll, with Hearst's involvement" at the time. She alleges she was dismissed a month later after she declined the proposal. Her attitude, as well as an earlier incident in which she labeled Robert Seixas, director of Delish Food, a "s**t manager," according to sources at Hearst, was a contributing factor in the company's issues with her. After receiving a reprimand from HR for the remark, some employees at the company informed that she was frequently quite vocal about how she felt about Hearst and her managers, as reported by Daily Mail.
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The company asserted that she would publicly criticize other managers in business Slack channels and was a vigorous Hearst Union organizer with colleagues from publications like Esquire and Cosmopolitan, which are also owned by Hearst. She refused nearly $10,000 in severance pay that would have required her to sign a nondisclosure agreement and claimed she was let go for criticizing the business after declining the TV offer for the show.
However, a Hearst HR representative claimed that Xie's actions damaged Hearst's relationship with A&E. As per Daily Mail, Xie stated, “I just need to have some self-respect, I'm not saying I'm completely devoid of responsibility for being fired, but there were some very wrong things going on here.”
Who is June Jiuxing Xie?
Xie, who was born in China but moved to New York as a child, started working at Delish on a freelance basis in 2018. A year later, she was hired on a full-time basis with a $45,000 salary. As a representative for the staff at the food site, she became active in her union campaign. In 2020, ‘Budget Eats’ appeared by accident when Xie experimented with working from home. The show's premise was straightforward -- she does all in her power to make a meal out of a tiny budget. Two million people watched the first episode titled ‘I Lived On A $5 A Day Budget For A Week In New York City,’ which quickly became popular.
Xie received a business award and a Webby while being one of the network's most-watched programs. Just a month after ‘Budget Eats’ was launched, she received an annual raise of $81,000 in June 2020. Despite this, she continued to push for workplace reform after being moved by a union workshop slide show that illustrated the traits of a "white supremacy culture" and which she believed accurately described the environment at Delish.
In an effort to prevent employee burnout, she went vocal and said, "'I would like to point out that even the smallest task being added to my plate become contributors to burnout over time."