The new CEO of Twitter Elon Musk has disappointed the employees at the company to a great extent. The boss had run several radical decisions and steps that have harmed the employees at large since his takeover. The deal itself was an excruciating process for both the company and the Tesla owner. But, when in October 2022 he completed the deal, there has been an upheaval in the market and the company internally. The biggest blow that the company received was the advertisers were pulling the plug on throwing money for advertising on platforms.
Then, in November 2022, he went on to axe the number of employees in the company rampantly due to heavy losses and the employees sued him over that. The process to reduce headcount was not democratic for some engineers. Musk fired many of his veteran engineers for speaking out against him on Twitter while disagreeing with some of his reforms. The lawsuits keep coming as now women have alleged that he discriminated against them during the mass layoffs.
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Two Former Female Twitter Employees Filed Lawsuit Against Elon Musk
The saga of the mass layoffs had taken over the tech world in the West. Due to the impending recession, many companies including Meta and Walt Disney announced mass layoffs and a hiring freeze. But, Musk-led Twitter made headlines for the layoffs throughout November 2022. On November 4th, 2022, the company sent out an email for the mass layoffs reducing half of the worker’s headcount globally. Then it followed on November 16th, 2022, he gave an ultimatum to the employees to either work “hardcore” or leave. This led to a mass exodus of employees from the company.
Two women filed a class action lawsuit against the discriminatory layoffs. Carolina Bernal Strifling and Willow Wren Turkal filed the lawsuit on behalf of similarly affected women employees. They claimed that during the November 4th, 2022 layoffs, 57% of women were sacked in comparison to 47% of male employees. In 2020, the company released its Inclusion and Diversity Report claiming to have reduced gender parity by having 50% of the women workforce on board by 2025.
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The Attorney Claimed That The Women Are More Affected Than Men Due To The Layoffs
When Musk fired thousands of its global workforce, many employees filed a class-action lawsuit against the company. Attorney Shannon Liss-Riordan represented the employees and filed a lawsuit in San Francisco. In her statement, she said, “We filed this lawsuit tonight 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.”
She continued, “We will now see if he is going to continue to thumb his nose at the laws of this country that protect employees. It appears that he’s repeating the same playbook of what he did at Tesla”.
The Boston-based attorney will also represent these women. The lawsuit she filed also said that the “hardcore” work that Elon envisioned for ‘Twitter 2.0’ was not possible for women juggling work and home. It also alleged that among the engineers, 63% of women engineers were laid off compared to 48% of men.
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