Twitter is facing legal action over allegations that it owes approximately $500m (£385m) in severance pay to former employees who were laid off by Elon Musk. The lawsuit claims that Twitter provided only one month of severance pay to most employees, with many not receiving any compensation at all. Elon Musk has terminated over half of Twitter’s 7,500 employees since acquiring the social network for $44bn last year.
The class action lawsuit was filed in a San Francisco federal court by former human resources boss, Courtney McMillian, who was leading Twitter’s employee benefits programs before being made redundant in January. McMillian stated that under Twitter’s severance plan established in 2019, most employees should have received two months of base salary plus one week of pay for each full year of service. Senior employees, including McMillian, were allegedly promised six months of base pay.
According to BBC News, it is claimed that Elon Musk was aware of the severance plan before the large-scale layoffs. Musk previously stated that “everyone exited was offered [three] months of severance, which is 50% more than legally required.”
This is not the first time that former employees have taken legal action against Twitter following Elon Musk’s takeover. In a proposed class action, Mark Schobinger, the former director of compensation, accused Twitter of failing to pay millions of dollars in promised bonuses to employees. Twitter has dismissed these claims as lacking merit. In January, 43 former UK-based workers threatened to sue Twitter for allegedly conducting a “sham redundancy process.” They claimed that Twitter terminated employees without following proper procedures, logged them out of computers and locked them out of offices before initiating a formal redundancy consultation retrospectively. UK-based workers were offered two months of basic salary, along with two weeks’ pay for each year they had worked for the company, according to the Financial Times.
Since Elon Musk’s cost-cutting measures, which included significant layoffs of engineers and other employees, Twitter has experienced various major glitches and outages. Twitter has been approached for comment.
Denial of responsibility! VigourTimes is an automatic aggregator of Global media. In each content, the hyperlink to the primary source is specified. All trademarks belong to their rightful owners, and all materials to their authors. For any complaint, please reach us at – [email protected]. We will take necessary action within 24 hours.
