Former employees have filed a federal lawsuit claiming the company’s actions are unlawful
© Getty Images / Justin Sullivan
Twitter is facing a class-action lawsuit from employees over mass layoffs, ordered by the company’s new billionaire owner, Elon Musk.
The legal action was brought on behalf of five employees on Thursday after the company informed its 7,500-strong workforce of impending layoffs in a memo. It said that workers would receive emails in their work mailboxes informing them if they were being fired or not. A copy of the message seen by the New York Times was sent from a generic address signed “Twitter” and did not specify the number of jobs that will go. Previous media reports stated that roughly half of the staff were to be fired.
One of the plaintiffs was sacked from the social platform on November 1, while three others have not been informed whether they fall under the layoffs at the time of filing, but had lost access to their work email accounts.
Lawyers claim that the move violates a US federal law called the Work Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act. Under the law, private companies with at least 100 full-time workers have to give at least 60 days advance written notice in case of mass redundancies if it affects at least 50 employees or a third of the total workforce. In the case of Twitter, some 3,750 members of staff are reportedly facing the sack.
“Plaintiffs file this action seeking to ensure that Twitter comply with the law and provide the requisite notice or severance payment in connection with the anticipated layoffs and that it not solicit releases of claims of any employees without informing them of the pendency of this action,” the lawsuit states, as cited by Yahoo Finance.
It is unclear so far whether other Twitter employees will join the class action.
Later on Thursday, some workers started posting on Twitter that they were no longer able to access their email accounts or their work laptops. According to the NYT, some employees started receiving emails on Friday saying that they had been laid off.
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