Twitter Inc. was sued over Elon Musk’s plan to lay off approximately 3,700 workers at the social-media platform, which workers claim is being carried out without adequate notice, in violation of federal and California law.
A class-action lawsuit was filed in federal court in San Francisco on Thursday.
Twitter plans to begin layoffs on Friday, according to an email sent to employees. According to people familiar with the situation, Musk intends to lay off half of his workforce in order to cut costs at the platform he purchased for $44 billion last month.
The federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act prohibits large corporations from conducting mass layoffs without providing at least 60 days’ notice.
Twitter did not immediately respond to a comment request.
The lawsuit requests that the court issue an order requiring Twitter to comply with the WARN Act and prohibiting the company from soliciting employees to sign documents that could waive their right to participate in litigation.
“We filed this lawsuit tonight 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, said in an interview.
Liss-Riordan filed a similar lawsuit against Tesla Inc. in June, when Musk’s electric-car company laid off about 10% of its workforce.
Tesla obtained a ruling from a federal judge in Austin that required the workers in that case to pursue their claims in closed-door arbitration rather than open court.
During a conversation with Bloomberg Editor-in-Chief John Micklethwait at the Qatar Economic Forum in June, Musk described the Tesla lawsuit as “trivial.”
“We’ll see if he continues to ignore the laws of this country that protect employees,” Liss-Riordan said of Musk. “He appears to be following the same playbook he used at Tesla.”