For months, Twitter was embroiled in a lawsuit with Elon Musk to make the billionaire follow through with the deal and acquire the social media company at a price of $44 billion. Now that the ownership has successfully passed into Musk’s hands, a tumultuous and dramatic first week of the new era is over, and Twitter’s top management is all but purged, the company finds itself, once again, battling a lawsuit.
This time, however, Twitter is not the party to file the class action lawsuit; instead, it is the one being sued by several of its former employees. And unsurprisingly, the blame for this can be laid at the feet of Elon “Chief Twit” Musk, whose plan to eliminate about 3,700 of Twitter’s workforce has backfired.
Musk’s plan to lay off 3700 employees – which amounts to nearly half of the 7500-person-strong workforce of the social media company – has led to Twitter being sued by five former employees, who were given the boot on Thursday. The lawsuit, filed with the US District Court in the Northern District of California, San Francisco division, informed that the company had laid off its employees without enough notice and violating both federal and California law.
Earlier today, Twitter notified its employees in an internal memo that it was “reducing our global workforce” in order to place the popular micro-blogging site on a “healthy path.” It would notify its employees of their fate – whether they are lucky enough to retain their job or whether they need to search for a new one – via email, and closed its offices temporarily as Musk, the new CEO of Twitter, is looking to slash costs at the platform.
According to a Bloomberg report, Twitter’s actions violated the terms of the federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act, which prevents large companies (which Twitter certainly qualifies as) from conducting mass layoffs without providing a notice of at least 60 days in advance.
“We filed this lawsuit tonight in an attempt the make sure that employees are aware that they should not sign away their rights and that they have an avenue for pursuing their rights,” Shannon Liss-Riordan, the attorney who filed Thursday’s complaint, said in an interview.
The plaintiffs seem to be concerned that Twitter will continue to walk down this path and persist in layoffs without providing prior notice with little to no regard for those who have made Twitter into a major social media platform for celebs, politicians, and journalists alike. This has prompted them to ask the court to issue an order that requires Twitter to obey the WARN Act, provide requisite notice or severance payment, and restricts it from soliciting employees to sign documents that could give up their right to participate in litigation.
