According to a lawsuit filed Wednesday alleges that Twitter refused to pay at least 500 million U.S. dollars (currently about RMB 3.585 billion) in severance pay to thousands of employees who were laid off after Elon Musk (Elon Musk) bought the company.
The proposed class action lawsuit was filed in San Francisco federal court by Courtney McMillian, the “head of total compensation” who was in charge of Twitter’s employee benefits program before she was laid off in January.
McMillian claims that under a severance plan that Twitter instituted in 2019, most employees were promised two months of base pay and one week’s pay for each year of service if they were laid off. Senior employees like McMillan were supposed to get six months of base pay, the lawsuit says. But Twitter only gave laid-off employees up to one month’s severance, and many received nothing.
Twitter laid off more than half of its employees to save money after Musk bought the company last October.
The lawsuit accuses Twitter and Musk of violating a federal law that regulates employee benefit plans. Twitter has been sued before for allegedly failing to pay severance, but those cases involved breach of contract claims, not benefits law. The company says it has paid its former employees in full.
A pending lawsuit filed last month alleges that Twitter also failed to pay millions of dollars in bonuses to remaining employees, claims that Twitter says lack merit. The company is also facing a series of other lawsuits stemming from layoffs that began last year, including allegations that it targeted women and people with disabilities. In the cases that have been filed in defence, Twitter has denied any wrongdoing.
