Twitter staff have sued the world’s richest man, Elon Musk for not giving them enough notice of sweeping layoffs, that began on Friday.
Gatekeepers News reports that Elon Musk is set to cut around 3,700 jobs which is about half of Twitter’s workforce in a bid to drive down costs at the company that he acquired for $44 billion last week. Twitter had a global workforce of some 7,500 employees at the end of 2021.
The employees say the company is terminating workers without enough notice in violation of federal and California law, Bloomberg reported on Friday, citing a class-action lawsuit filed in a San Francisco federal court.
Twitter, in a memo on Thursday night, warned staff to brace for firing notices. It said all employees will receive an email alert by 9 am Pacific time Friday letting them know whether they still have a job at the company.
The social media company said its offices will be temporarily sealed and all staff badge access will be suspended in order “to help ensure the safety of each employee as well as Twitter systems and customer data.”
Staff reported access to their email and other communication software – such as Slack – had been cut, with little or no warning. They also reported being remotely logged out of laptops, which were wiped of data.
Employees in London reported losing access overnight, finding they were unable to log in on Friday morning. One Twitter employee told Britain’s BBC: “[My] MacBook remotely logged out, slack access gone, email gone.”
“If you are in an office or on your way to an office, please return home,” the staff memo said. “In an effort to place Twitter on a healthy path, we will go through the difficult process of reducing our global workforce on Friday.
“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.”
Twitter said its employees who are not affected by the layoffs will be notified via their work email addresses on Friday morning. Staff who have been laid off will be notified of the next steps in a message to their personal email addresses with the subject line ‘Your Role at Twitter’, the memo said.
“Please check your email, including your spam folder,” the memo advised.
“We acknowledge this is an incredibly challenging experience to go through, whether or not you are impacted. Thank you for continuing to adhere to Twitter policies that prohibit you from discussing confidential company information on social media, with the press or elsewhere.”
Staff at Twitter’s offices in Australia are expected to receive an email at 1am on Saturday telling them whether or not they have been sacked, while Twitter’s UK employees are also bracing themselves to hear whether they will fall victim to Musk’s mass sackings.
British staff were asleep when their laptops were ‘remotely wiped’ and their access to Slack and Gmail revoked, according to one staffer.
As the layoffs began, sacked Twitter employees posted on the platform under the ‘#OneTeam’ hashtag about their final hours at the company, expressing a mixture of sadness and gratitude for their time working there.
Simon Balmain, whose Twitter profile said he was a ‘former Senior Community Manager’ at the company, wrote: “Looks like I’m unemployed y’all. Just got remotely logged out of my work laptop and removed from Slack. #OneTeam forever. Loved you all so much. So sad it had to end this way.”
Another by the name of Miryam wrote: “Don’t cry because it’s over. Smile because it happened.” She wrote the message along-side a picture of her posing in front of a large blue Twitter bird mounted on a wall at the offices.
Karen Zapata, another employee, posted a picture of her laptop screen, having been locked out. “This gray screen could have been a meeting,” she wrote – suggesting she was unhappy with how impersonal the sacking was.
One Twitter employee shared a selfie of her and two other colleagues in an elevator which she wrote was at Twitter’s New York City offices. “Last teary eyed @TwitterNYC elevator selfie,” she wrote. The employee, named Rena, also posted that she had been ‘logged out’ of the Twitter Slack channels and her email account.
Some wrote how Twitter employees spent their final hours talking on the company’s Slack (an internal business instant messaging app), sharing memories while waiting to hear whether they would lose their jobs or not.
Another Twitter user who said he had been sacked was less sentimental.
“Honestly happy to be laid off but the veil of @elonmusk is pierced,” the user by the name of Kushal Dave wrote on the platform. “As messy as Twitter was pre-elon, it is a veritable clowntown of politics and toadyism and psychological abuse now. Afraid to get in my Tesla with what I learned this week.”
According to Bloomberg, the lawsuit asked the court to order Twitter to obey the ‘WARN Act’. The Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act aim to prevent mass layoffs without giving 60-day notice.
The lawsuit asked the court to issue an order requiring Twitter to obey the act and restrict the company from asking employees to sign documents that could surrender their right to take part in litigation.
Lisa Bloom, a lawyer and founder of The Bloom Firm, said ‘A layoff of 50+ employees within a 30-day period qualifies [for the WARN act].’ Addressing sacked Twitter employees, she wrote: ‘I know you didn’t get that notice.’
‘This WARN law applies to all California employers of 75+ employees, which obviously includes Twitter with its thousands of employees,’ she explained. ‘Purpose of the law is to give laid-off employees time to figure out how to handle this disruption. And Elon completely ignores it.’
Bloomberg said the class action lawsuit was filed by Shannon Liss-Riordan, who sued Musk’s electric car company Tesla Inc. over similar claims in June when it laid off around 10 percent of its workforce.
“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,” Liss-Riordan told Bloomberg.
