Elon Musk failed to provide previously promised severance payouts to laid-off Twitter employees
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Twitter employees who were laid off are suing the company, claiming they were promised a variety of severance benefits.
Elon Musk: Twitter employees who were laid off are suing the company, claiming they were promised a variety of severance benefits.
According to the lawsuit, they were guaranteed that these perks would continue when Elon Musk purchased Twitter.
However, recently laid-off employees claim Twitter failed to pay them their promised severance money.
Employees who were laid off by Twitter are suing the firm, which is now owned by Elon Musk, alleging breach of previously agreed severance benefits.
Five employees who filed a class-action lawsuit against Twitter on November 1 now claim they were promised at least two months’ severance pay, bonus plan compensation, cash value of vested Twitter equity, and healthcare coverage, but that these promises were broken when Musk laid off about 3,700 employees on November 4.
The new charges were presented in court files to the San Francisco federal court on Tuesday, which Insider also saw.
According to the Tuesday update, Twitter’s management previously said at many all-hands meetings, in a recent FAQ, and in a merger agreement that if staff were laid off after Musk acquired the firm, they would receive at least the equivalent of the originally promised amount.
According to the lawsuit, Twitter employees “reasonably relied” on this guarantee in the weeks preceding up to Musk’s purchase and elected not to look for work elsewhere.
According to the revised lawsuit, Twitter later informed employees affected by the November mass layoffs that they would only receive one month’s base pay after their departure.
This claims appears to contradict Musk’s November 4 tweet, which stated that all departing employees were given three months’ severance pay.
Musk has worked every day to find new methods to screw over Twitter employees, according to his counsel.
According to Shannon Liss-Riordan, the attorney who brought the lawsuit, Musk is adding an extra two months of severance compensation because certain employees were advised on November 4 that they would be laid off in two months.
According to their lawsuit, these employees, which included three of the plaintiffs, were locked out of their corporate accounts on November 3, but were informed they would be paid until January 4, 2023.
“This is not severance compensation,” Liss-Riordan argued in the case, accusing Musk of just using this term of payment to comply with federal and state labour rules. The Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act, also known as the WARN Act, is a federal law that requires businesses with 100 or more employees to provide 60 days’ notice of mass layoffs or other work disruptions.
“It appears Elon Musk has laboured every day since assuming control of Twitter barely two weeks ago to find new and imaginative methods to screw over the company’s workers,” Liss-Riordan said in a statement to Insider. “We recently filed an emergency request to protect the employees Twitter is laying off from signing away their rights to receive what they are due by the corporation.”
Twitter’s previous top four executives — Parag Agrawal, Ned Segal, Vijaya Gadde, and Sarah Personette — stood to profit by being dismissed by Musk for a total of $88 million. Musk disputed on October 31 that he fired the senior executives “for cause” in order to avoid paying them large severance packages.
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