Just a few days after Elon Musk’s $44 billion acquisition of the business, Twitter Inc. was sued on Thursday for a proposal that would have abruptly eliminated 3,700 positions at the social media platform.
Cornet v. Twitter Inc., a class action lawsuit that was filed on Thursday in federal court in San Francisco, has signatures from employees who contend that the firm did not give them proper notice and is in direct violation of federal and California law.
Employees of Twitter who were outraged Thursday night sent each other supportive messages, many of which included the hashtag #OneTeam. One of these was a tweet from a worker who claimed to be eight months pregnant, to be locked out of their work laptop on Thursday night, and to have just been fired.
Twitter announced its intention to start staff reductions on Friday in an email to employees that was issued on Thursday and was later obtained by numerous media sites. Publicly, Musk had stated his intention to reduce the company’s personnel by half.
Musk’s plans to overhaul Twitter would then be directly at odds with the federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act, which forbids major corporations from carrying out significant layoffs without at least 60 days’ notice.
In a statement to Bloomberg, the lawyer who filed the complaint on Thursday said: “We filed this lawsuit tonight in an effort to ensure that employees are aware that they should not sign away their rights and that they have a method for doing so.
Liss-Riordan continued, “We will now see if (Musk) is going to continue to thumb his nose at the rules of this country that safeguard employees. He seems to be working from the same playbook as when he worked at Tesla.
In June, when 10% of the company’s personnel was laid off, Liss-Riordan filed a lawsuit against Musk’s Tesla Inc. A federal judge’s decision that required employees to pursue their claims in secret arbitration was overturned by Tesla.
This is not the first criticism Musk and Twitter have faced since the deal was consummated last week. Since Elon Musk bought Twitter last week, according to a study by Montclair State University, there has been an increase in hate speech on the social media site.
