Twitter has started laying off employees in India as part of a global job cut ordered by the social media platform’s new owner Elon Musk to attain economies of scale
Twitter intends to start cutting staff Friday, the company said in an email to employees. Musk plans to get rid of half the workforce
New Delhi, NFAPost: Twitter has started laying off employees in India as part of a global job cut ordered by the social media platform’s new owner Elon Musk to attain economies of scale and make the $44 billion acquisition viable.
The world’s richest businessman Musk began his innings at Twitter last week by firing the CEO Parag Agrawal as well as the CFO and some other top executives.
This was followed by an exodus of top management. Musk has now started a massive exercise to downsize the company’s global workforce.
“Lay-off has started. Some of my colleagues have received an email notification regarding this,” a Twitter India employee told PTI on condition of anonymity.
Another source said the lay-offs have affected a “significant chunk” of the India team.
The full details of the job cuts were not immediately available.
Twitter India did not respond to email queries.
The US-based social media platform, in an internal email to employees earlier, had said, “In an effort to place Twitter on a healthy path, we will go through the difficult process of reducing our global workforce on Friday.”
It said that “everyone will receive an individual email”.
The company will temporarily close all offices for the safety of employees as well as Twitter systems and customer data.
“If you are in an office or on your way to an office, please return home,” Twitter had said.
While Twitter had several run-ins with the government over freedom of speech, the company in the email barred employees from discussing confidential company information on social media, with the press or elsewhere.
Twitter sued for mass layoffs by Elon Musk without enough notice
Twitter Inc. was sued over Elon Musk’s plan to eliminate about 3,700 jobs at the social media platform, which workers say the company is doing without enough notice in violation of federal and California law.
A class-action lawsuit was filed Thursday in San Francisco federal court.
Twitter intends to start cutting staff Friday, the company said in an email to employees. Musk plans to get rid of half the workforce, making good on plans to slash costs at the platform the acquired for $44 billion last month, people with knowledge of the matter have said.
The federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act restricts large companies from mounting mass layoffs without at least 60 days of advance notice.
Twitter didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
The lawsuit asks the court to issue an order requiring Twitter to obey the WARN Act, and restricting the company from soliciting employees to sign documents that could give up their right to participate in litigation.
“We filed this lawsuit tonight in an attempt the 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 Thursday’s complaint, said in an interview.
Liss-Riordan sued Tesla Inc. over similar claims in June when the electric-car maker headed by Musk laid off about 10% of its workforce.
Tesla won a ruling from a federal judge in Austin forcing the workers in that case to pursue their claims in closed-door arbitration instead of in open court.
Musk described the Tesla lawsuit as “trivial” during a discussion with Bloomberg Editor-In-Chief John Micklethwait at the Qatar Economic Forum in June.
“We will now see if he is going to continue to thumb his nose at the laws of this country that protect employees,” Liss-Riordan said of Musk. “It appears that he’s repeating the same playbook of what he did at Tesla.”
The case is Cornet v. Twitter Inc., 22-cv-06857, US District Court, Northern District of California (San Francisco).
