Thousands of Twitter employees woke up this morning to find that their work accounts had been wiped and they no longer had jobs—but the layoffs may not be legal, and some former employees are already suing the company.
According to The New York Times, about half of Twitter’s 7,500 employees were fired on Thursday and Friday (depending on the employees’ local timezones). A leaked anonymous memo told employees that if they were fired, an email would be sent to their personal accounts and they should not plan to report to work on Friday.
However, because Twitter’s headquarters are in California, the company’s sudden layoffs may violate California’s Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification law, which requires employers to give 60 days’ notice if they’re planning on firing 50 or more employees within a 30-day period. Lisa Bloom, an attorney whose firm specializes in employment law, has put out the call for laid off employees to join a class action lawsuit against Twitter.
In the Twitter thread, Bloom explains that companies who are found to have violated the WARN Act are required to pay a penalty of $500 a day per violation, plus back pay and potential medical expenses to the employees themselves.
Tech Crunch reports that former Twitter employees Emmanuel Cornet, Justine De Caires, Jessica Pan, and Grae Kindel have already filed a lawsuit, stating that they were fired on November 3rd in violation of the WARN Act.
A spokesperson for Twitter told The New York Times that laid off employees will remain on the payroll for “several months” in order to comply with the WARN Act, even though they’re prohibited from doing any work for the company. There’s no word yet on how paying employees but preventing them from working will help Musk recoup the $44 billion he spent impulse-buying Twitter.
(featured image: Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images for The Met Museum/Vogue)
