Twitter is being sued by former employees for Elon Musk’s mass firing

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Twitter is being sued in a class-action lawsuit filed by former employees laid off as part of a mass firing instigated by the company’s new owner, Elon Musk.

The lawsuit alleges that the workers were not given enough notice of their firing in accordance with both the federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act (WARN) and California WARN Act. These acts require that companies give employees at least 60 days of advance notice before a mass firing takes place.

The lawsuit was filed in an attempt to “make sure that employees are aware that they should not sign away their rights and that they have an avenue for pursuing their rights,” Shannon Liss-Riordan, the attorney who filed the complaint on Thursday night, told Bloomberg.

The suit was filed in US District Court in San Francisco and names five workers as plaintiffs. The suit notes that one of the plaintiffs named had already been fired at the time of filing, while three others had been locked out of company accounts — an action presumed to indicate they will soon be formally terminated.

One of the plaintiffs named in the suit, Manu Cornet, tweeted their participation: “Was not planning on doing anything like this initially… But… Look Ma I’m suing Twitter.”

Twitter notified employees on Friday, November 4th, in an unsigned memo that “in an effort to place [the company] on a healthy path,” it will be “reducing our global workforce.” Musk is expected to cut around half of Twitter’s estimated 7,500 staff as part of an effort to reduce the company’s costs.

This is not the first time Musk’s management style has led to class-action lawsuits. Two former employees at Tesla sued the company in June for violation of the same WARN Act.

At the time of publication, Twitter had not responded to a request for comment.

You can read the lawsuit in full below: