Only one month After Twitter’s new CEO, Elon Musk, oversaw mass layoffs, former Twitter employees announced that they are filing a lawsuit over the company’s severance policies. During a press conference with their attorney Lisa Bloom, former employees Helen-Sage Lee, Adrian Trejo Nuñez and Amir Shevat alleged that the company’s handling of their termination constituted misconduct. breach of contract and violation of the California Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notice (WARN) Action.
There may be only a handful of former employees involved at the moment, but Twitter could soon be flooded with similar cases and be forced to pay legal fees that run into the millions. Rafael Nendel‑Flores, a California-based employment attorney, said the legal strategy of filing multiple arbitration cases, which could be a way to bypass the constraints of a dispute settlement agreement, will pressure on Twitter. “The arbitration fees alone can be huge,” he said.
That’s because the employer, in this case Twitter, bears the cost of the arbitration process. And having to deal with hundreds or thousands of cases at once can be a significant administrative and financial burden for a company that is struggling with massive losses in business. advertiser revenue. Nendel-Flores said each individual arbitration case could easily cost between $50,000 and $100,000. “In my view, that is a significant pressure point—that Ms. Bloom and perhaps the other plaintiffs’ attorneys will try to advance these individual arbitrations.”
Like most Twitter employees, Lee and others waived their rights to the class action when they took their jobs through a dispute resolution agreement that referred all legal claims to arbitration. . This means that if they have a problem with the company, each person will have to negotiate on their own. For employers, such a legal mechanism prevents massive class-action lawsuits. But for Twitter, faced with so many disgruntled former employees, it could lead to death by thousands of cuts.
And Bloom’s customers are not alone. Last week, Akiva Cohen, an attorney representing another group of Twitter employees, Notice to the company that his client will also file an arbitration lawsuit if the company does not “confirmatively confirm” that former employees will be paid the full amount of severance they say Twitter promised them.
“No one is really looking forward to walking into a work environment, especially a new job that you are really excited about, thinking that one day you will sue your employer or your employer will treat you. you in a way worthy of the law. action,” Lee said.
When Musk first announced the layoffs, another group of employees applied priority event against Twitter for potentially violating the WARN Act, which requires companies to give employees 60-day notice of layoffs. In response, Twitter has agreed to keep the laid-off employees on its payroll as non-employees until January 4, but the layoffs for the laid-off employees have yet to happen. clear. Lee, Nuñez and Shevat allege that the severance pay the company offered after the acquisition was different from what they had promised before the takeover.
