SAN FRANCISCO — Twitter employees filed a class-action lawsuit against the company on Thursday following reports that the social media platform’s new owner, Elon Musk, plans to lay off about half its workforce.
Musk closed a $44 billion purchase of Twitter late last month and swiftly fired several top executives, according to The Washington Post and The New York Times. In an email sent to employees late Thursday and obtained by the Post, Twitter officials said they planned to begin layoffs across the company on Friday “in an effort to place Twitter on a healthy path.”
“We recognize that this will impact a number of individuals who have made valuable contributions to Twitter, but this action is unfortunately necessary to ensure the company’s success moving forward,” the memo said.
Employees were expected to get emails by Friday morning saying whether their jobs would be terminated.
In the class-action lawsuit, filed Thursday in federal court, employees said Twitter failed to provide employees with advance notice of the planned mass layoff, in violation of federal and California law. The state and federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification acts require employers to give written notice 60 days before enacting mass layoffs, including ones that eliminate 500 or more jobs.
Musk plans to eliminate about 3,700 jobs across Twitter, Bloomberg News reported. About 7,500 people work for the company, according to the Times.
Employees asked a court to require Twitter to follow the procedures laid out in the WARN acts and to stop the company from trying to get releases from employees that would allow Twitter to bypass the laws.
“Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, has made clear that he believes complying with federal labor laws is ‘trivial,’” attorney Shannon Liss-Riordan, who filed the lawsuit, said in a statement to CNN. “We have filed this federal complaint to ensure that Twitter be held accountable to our laws and to prevent Twitter employees from unknowingly signing away their rights.”
Liss-Riordan in June sued the Musk-owned electric-car company Tesla Inc. on behalf of employees over similar claims that the company laid off workers without prior notice, according to Reuters. In June, Musk called the lawsuit “trivial,” Bloomberg reported.
“We will now see if he is going to continue to thumb his nose at the laws of this country that protect employees,” Liss-Riordan told Bloomberg. “It appears that he’s repeating the same playbook of what he did at Tesla.”
Musk initially sought to buy Twitter in April and three months later said he changed his mind, citing concerns about the number of fake accounts on the site. In response, Twitter sued to require him to complete the purchase.
The deal was closed on Oct. 27.
©2022 Cox Media Group
