Mass dismissals on Twitter threaten to end up in court. The company has been sued this Thursday night in a class action in federal court in San Francisco, California, where it is based, for violating the laws by cutting staff without prior notice of dismissal.
Under local law, the company must give 60 days' notice in a mass layoff. Twitter's exits would fall into this assumption by exceeding 50 workers laid off within 30 days -if Musk's plans are fulfilled- and employing more than 75 workers, since it has more than 7,000.
The class action suit may disrupt Elon Musk's plans to lay off half of his workforce, some 3,700 workers. Precisely this Friday the employees will receive from 9:00 a.m. -5:00 p.m. in Spain- the notification of the end of their contract through an email. If they are still with the company, they will be notified in their Twitter mail. If they leave, in the staff. The security of the headquarters is already prepared for the departure day and internal agendas have been deactivated that allow workers to contact each other.
As reported by several employees on the social network itself, some have already found themselves without remote access and have been expelled from Slack, the platform used to organize work. All without prior notice. "Looks like I'm unemployed," said one worker.
“We filed this lawsuit in an attempt to make sure that employees know they shouldn't give up their rights and that they have an avenue to exercise them,” Shannon Liss-Riordan, the attorney who filed Thursday's lawsuit, said in an interview. If the lawsuit goes ahead, the company would face a penalty of $500 per employee per day for each fraudulent dismissal, lawyer Lisa Bloom recalled in a thread on Twitter.
For the firm led by Musk today, the layoffs "are unfortunately necessary to guarantee the success of the company in the future." According to Bloomberg, Musk is hell-bent on cutting costs after buying Twitter for $44 billion. The billionaire agreed to pay $54.20 a share in April, just as markets were falling. He then tried for months to opt out of the transaction, claiming the company misled him about the prevalence of fake accounts.
Twitter sued him to force Musk to fulfill his agreement, and in recent weeks the businessman relented, resigning himself to closing the deal under the agreed terms.
After joining the company, Musk outlined a series of projects in which he asked staff to work "24 hours a day." Among them, the introduction of a subscription of 8 dollars per month that will allow users to obtain verification -the blue tick-, see less advertising and increase the visibility of the published content.
Advertisers, responsible for 90% of the social network's turnover, are concerned about the impact that the new content moderation policy could have, which would affect visibility and advertising return.
Another of Musk's first measures is to end teleworking: it will be required to go to the office in person starting next Monday. Nor will some days of rest that were foreseen in the work calendar of the employees be maintained.
