Twitter employees fired by Elon Musk without notice sue the company

Twitter Inc. was sued for the plan Elon Musk to remove around 3,700 jobs on the social media platform, what workers say the company is doing without prior notice in violation of federal and California law.

A class action lawsuit was filed Thursday in federal court in San Francisco.

Twitter intends to start cutting staff this Friday, the company said in an email to employees. Musk plans to get rid of the half of the workforcemeeting plans to cut costs on the platform it acquired for $44 billion last month, people with knowledge of the matter said.

The federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act restricts large companies from mass layoffs without at least 60 days notice.

Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The lawsuit asks the court to issue an order requiring Twitter to obey the WARN Act and that restricts the company from asking employees to sign documents that could waive their right to participate in litigation.

“We are filing this lawsuit tonight in an attempt to ensure that employees know that they should not give up their rights and that they have a way to exercise their rights,” he said in an interview Shannon Liss-Riordanthe attorney who filed Thursday’s complaint.

Liss-Riordan sued Tesla Inc. for a similar situation in Junewhen the Musk-led electric car maker laid off around 10% of its workforce.

Tesla won a ruling from a federal judge in Austin that forced the workers in that case to pursue their claims in closed-door arbitration rather than open court.

Musk described Tesla’s lawsuit as “trivial” during a discussion with the editor-in-chief of Bloomberg, John Micklethwaitat the Qatar Economic Forum in June.

“Now we’ll see if he’s going to continue flouting the laws of this country that protect employees,” Liss-Riordan said of Musk. “It seems that he is repeating the same playbook that he used in Tesla,” he said.

(With information from Bloomberg)

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