Four former Twitter employees who are suing the social media site spoke with JEE News about how the mass layoffs took place and say the business violated their rights as employees.
At a news conference Thursday outside the Philip Burton Federal Building and United States Courthouse in San Francisco, Emanuel “Mano” Cornett, a former Twitter engineer, said, “It seems like the layoffs have been done in a way that’s unbelievable. Extremely sloppy, inhumane, and probably illegal.”
In November, Twitter fired Cornett after billionaire Elon Musk took control of the microblogging platform. In a complaint, Cornett and other former Twitter workers claim the firm violated federal and California labor laws, which require employers to give employees 60 days’ written notice of mass layoffs.
Twitter’s legal problems have escalated since Musk took over. More than half of Twitter’s 7,500 employees were laid off as Musk tried to cut costs.
According to a JEE News report, a labor attorney named Shannon Less-Riordan has filed four lawsuits seeking class-action status against Twitter on behalf of former workers, including contractors.
Workers with disabilities are among those who claim that Musk’s demands to be more “tough” on employees and work from home forced them to quit because of health problems.
Lives are on the line, yet Musk, the world’s richest man, seems to have bought the company more as a toy than anything else, according to Riordan.
A new complaint asserts that Twitter’s layoffs “affected female employees more than male employees.” According to the lawsuit, Twitter laid off 57 percent of its female employees and only 47 percent of its male employees.
“It’s not a big surprise, unfortunately, that women were hit so hard by these layoffs while Elon Musk was overseeing these incredibly ad hoc layoffs,” Riordan said.
In response to a request for comment about the lawsuit, Twitter, which recently downsized its communications team, remained silent.
Some of the fired employees claimed that they were taking part in the legal proceedings to help some of their friends and former co-workers.
Former Twitter engineer Willow Warren Turkle, one of the primary plaintiffs in the gender discrimination complaint, said she knows former employees who have families to support, visa concerns, or are just starting their careers. Reported by Lett.
“I want them to come out of what’s due to them,” she said.
