Former staff sue Twitter as Elon Musk begins mass layoffs

Twitter is being sued over new owner Elon Musk’s decision to cut 3,700 staff jobs.  

A class-action lawsuit was filed Thursday in a U.S. District Court in San Francisco, where Twitter headquarters are located, by a handful of former employees.  

The employees argue that Musk broke federal and California state law by not giving enough notice for mass layoffs.   

The lawsuit claims that Musk violated both the federal and state WARN Act, the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act, which requires large companies to give 60 days’ notice before issuing mass layoffs.  

One of the plaintiffs named in the suit said they were terminated Tuesday and three other staffers were locked out of there Twitter accounts on Thursday, which they took to mean they are being let go, with no formal notice of a layoff, according to court documents.  

Now, plaintiffs are asking a judge to file an injunction to stop Twitter from laying off employees without advance written notice, according to the lawsuit.  

The attorney who filed the lawsuit on Thursday, Shannon Liss-Riordan, told Bloomberg that employees should fight for their rights.  

“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 the outlet.  

Shortly after taking over Twitter in a $44 billion deal, Musk planned to fire 3,700 employees, or about half of Twitter’s workforce, in order to cut costs and relieve the company’s debt from “overpaying” its employees. 

Staff were told in a company-wide memo that layoffs would begin on Friday.  

“In an effort to place Twitter on a healthy path, we will go through the difficult process of reducing our global workforce on Friday,” the memo read. 

Staff were also told in the memo that all employees would get an email on Friday and those employees being terminated would receive an email with “next steps” to their personal email accounts.  

Twitter has not responded to a request for comment.