Elon Musk’s tenure as the new owner of Twitter – aka the “Chief Twit” – hasn’t gone according to plan. After being forced into honoring his agreement to buy the social media giant for $44 billion, he’s been busy applying that Musk magic. This has resulted in a bizarre proposal to let users purchase a blue Verified tickmark, employees left bemused by being asked to print out code they’d worked on, and planned mass layoffs that have seen Musk compared to genocidal space tyrant Thanos.
Many Twitter employees will no longer have a job by the end of the day, with Musk determined to slash costs and turn the company into a money-making venture. But, a little thing called the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act may stymie his foolish ambitions. This federal act requires large companies to give “at least” six days of advance notice before mass layoffs.
As such, a class-action lawsuit against Twitter Inc. has now been filed in San Francisco federal court that may throw up a major roadblock to Musk’s plans. This asks the court to issue an order that Twitter obey WARN, and to stop them from making employees sign documents preventing them from participating in future litigation.
Attorney Shannon Liss-Riordan, who filed the complaint, spoke out on why the legal action needed to be filed.
“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. … 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.”
We doubt this will deter Musk from his crusade against Twitter’s workforce, though by the terms of WARN, he may be facing a substantial bill for compensation from former employees down the line. Then again, he can afford legions of high-priced lawyers that’ll bog down any actual payment for years as this progresses through the inevitable appeals.
Either way, by the close of business today, Twitter HQ is likely to have a lot of empty desks.