A week after finalizing his $44 billion buy, Twitter CEO Elon Musk announced mass layoffs within the company were ‘unfortunately necessary’.
A class-action lawsuit was reportedly filed against Twitter on Thursday on behalf of workers, claiming the company’s intended layoffs violate a federal law requiring 60 days notice for employees.
A week after Elon Musk finalized his $44 billion purchase of the Silicon Valley-based social media platform, a letter went out to employees saying about half of the company’s 7,500-person workforce will be losing their jobs starting Friday.
“Team, in an effort to place Twitter on a healthy path, we will go through the difficult process of reducing our global workforce on Friday,” Thursday’s email to employees read, according to the Washington Post. “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.”
Several top executives have already left the company amid the impending layoffs, including former CEO Parag Agrawal, Chief Financial Officer Ned Segal, and policy chief Vijaya Gadde.
The Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act requires large companies to notify workers two months in advance of planned job cuts, according to Bloomberg.
“We filed this lawsuit tonight in an attempt to make sure that employees are aware that they should not sign away their rights and that they have an avenue for pursuing their rights,” attorney Shannon Liss-Riordan, who filed the San Francisco lawsuit said, the outlet reported.
She continued, “We will now see if he is going to continue to thumb his nose at the laws of this country that protect employees. It appears that he’s repeating the same playbook of what he did at Tesla.”
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Liss-Riordan filed a lawsuit in Texas against Musk’s electric car company in June after it laid off 10% of its employees.
A Texas judge ruled in favor of Tesla, ordering employees to go through arbitration.
According to Twitter’s merger agreement with Musk, laid off employees must receive severance and benefits on par with what they would have received before his takeover, the Los Angeles Times reported.
