Elon Musk, the new boss of the company was writing emails about the fate of their jobs for Twitter staffers. However, a lawsuit was filed in California accusing the company of violating both federal and state law.
This suit was filed Thursday in San Francisco Federal Court. It claims that Twitter violated the law which prohibits large corporations from imposing mass layoffs without at most 60 days notice. Bloomberg News first reportedThe suit.
However, the suit didn’t stop Twitter’s new boss from sending notices to thousands upon notices sent out Thursday. This was in response to a memo that was shared on Thursday. It warned them they would be notified on their corporate email if they keep their jobs and on their personal email when their jobs are eliminated.
Some Twitter employees started posting on Twitter as early as Thursday night. They were locked out their company email accountsBefore the scheduled layoff notification.
The lawsuit requests that the court issue an order for Twitter to comply with the federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act and to stop Musk’s social media company from forcing employees to sign documents which could limit their rights to participate in lawsuits.
Employers with more than 100 employees must report layoffs that involve 500 or more employees to the law. This applies regardless of whether the company is public traded or privately traded. The Associated Press reported.
Musk fired Parag Agrawal, the CEO, and other executives shortly after closing his platform buyout. He also removed the company’s board of directors and installed himself as the sole board member.
“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, told Bloomberg.
The attorney filed a similar lawsuit over layoffs at Musk’s Tesla Inc. in June, the report said, as the electric-car maker excessed about 10% of its employees. A federal judge in Austin, Texas ruled in favor of Tesla, allowing the workers to pursue their claims through closed-door arbitration rather than open court.
Musk called this suit “trivial.”
“We will now see if he is going to continue to thumb his nose at the laws of this country that protect employees,”Bloomberg was informed by Liss-Riordan. “It appears that he’s repeating the same playbook of what he did at Tesla.”
