On Friday, Twitter won a legal ruling which will force a group of laid-off workers to seek arbitration against the company over their grievances, rather than a class-action lawsuit against the social media platform.
San Francisco federal judge James Donato ruled that the workers will be unable to launch a class-action lawsuit as the severance packages they accepted contained agreements, including an arbitration agreement, which basically waived their ability to sue Twitter in a court of law.
The judge delayed a ruling on whether to drop the entire class action lawsuit, and instead divide the plaintiffs up into individual arbitration cases, because three employees who had joined the suit after it was filed, say they never signed the arbitration agreement.
Shannon Liss-Riordan, a lawyer who represents the former Twitter employees, says that laid-off Twitter staff have already filed over 300 demands for arbitration, and there will likely be more filed in the coming months. Twitter employees maintain they either did not receive the full severance package promised by the company, or they did not receive sufficient notice of the upcoming layoffs. Several have also filed complaints over either sex or disability discrimination.
Although there has been no official comment from Twitter, the company appears to assume it will be easier to deal with separate arbitration cases, as opposed to a class-action lawsuit. Attorney Liss-Riordan noted her firm will represent each individual case against Twitter, due to the illegality of the company’s actions toward its former employees.
She said, “If former Twitter employees need to bring individual arbitrations in order to enforce their rights, we are ready to represent them – and will bring hundreds or thousands of arbitrations if necessary to ensure that Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, is held accountable under the law.”
Following CEO Elon Musk’s acquisition of the social media platform, he launched into an extensive reorganization designed to cut costs, describing the platform as on the “fast lane to bankruptcy.” Among the measures he took was cutting over half of Twitter’s 7,500 strong workforce.
