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Techspace - Laid-off Employees of Twitter were required to wait tensely for two months before the corporation provided them with their severance agreements. Twitter blamed the delay on staff members initiating legal action regarding their terminations. When they eventually came through, Twitter blamed the postponement on staff members.
On November 4, the social media giant terminated the employment of thousands of employees. Saturday was the day that social media platform Twitter delivered on its promise to provide separation contracts, which were sent via emails from the company CPT Group, which provides administrative services.
"Please note that we would have delivered you these agreements sooner, but a court order secured by plaintiffs' counsel resulted in this delay," Twitter's HR staff stated in a follow-up email seen by Insider.
"Thank you for your patience," the email concluded.
The email did not go into detail about the court decision, which has come down in one of the lawsuits that Twitter is fighting in California federal court over Elon Musk's management of layoffs since taking over the site in October.
A federal court in California agreed with a claim made in a case brought by a group of employees at varied layoff phases. The lawsuit asserted that Twitter should tell individuals obtaining severance agreements about relevant ongoing disputes.
This lawsuit was brought by plaintiffs, including Emmanuel Cornet, whom Twitter fired at the beginning of November, and others formally being laid off this month and next.
According to the court docket, the California federal court confirmed the content of the notification on December 20. Attorney Shannon Liss-Riordan, representing plaintiffs in the litigation, told Insider that Twitter had adequate time to have issued it earlier.
In an interview with Insider's Kali Hays, several former Twitter employees expressed their dissatisfaction with the final severance package the firm provided them. In exchange for agreeing not to sue Twitter or publicly criticize the firm, the contracts give a month's worth of severance compensation to former employees on the condition that they remain silent against Twitter and its operations.
Musk had previously stated that former employees would receive a severance package of three months' pay when they left the firm.
According to Liss-Riordan, the court decision provided Twitter enough time to send out the agreements before January 4, 2023, the termination date assigned to individual laid-off staff.
"It's disheartening, but not surprising, that Elon Musk would try to save money by ripping off his new employees and not paying them what they were promised," she added. "We look forward to taking him on in court, in arbitration, or anywhere we need to recoup what they are due."
The message was intended to provide employees with "information about their alternatives when determining whether to accept the agreement," according to Liss-Riordan.
According to the allegations made in the lawsuit brought by Cornet, Elon Musk violated the notice requirements established by laws such as the federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act, which mandates that employees be given a notice period of at least 60 days before being laid off.
The Twitter employees also claimed that before Musk's acquisition of the firm, the management had informed them that they would be entitled to the same severance benefits as usual, even if Musk were to come in and execute layoffs. According to the complaint, some of these perks Twitter had promised before Musk's purchase included a severance compensation package of at least two months' worth and additional incentives.
Better, a startup company in the mortgage industry terminated the employment of a significant number of its workers in 2021 at a large Zoom conference. To make up for the fact that these workers did not get the legally mandated notice period, Better provided them with additional severance pay
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