Just a month After new Twitter CEO Elon Musk oversaw massive staff layoffs, former Twitter employees announced they were taking legal action over the company’s layoff policies. In a press conference with their lawyer Lisa Bloom, former employees Helen-Sage Lee, Adrian Trejo Nuñez and Amir Shevat alleged that the company’s handling of their termination constituted a breach of contract and a violation of notice California Worker Adjustment and Retraining (WARN) Act.
It may be just a handful of former employees left, but Twitter could soon be inundated with similar cases and be forced to pay legal fees running into millions of dollars. Rafael Nendel-Flores, a California-based employment lawyer, says the legal strategy of initiating multiple arbitration proceedings, which is likely a way to circumvent the constraints of a dispute resolution agreement, will raise pressure on Twitter. “The arbitration costs alone could be enormous,” he says.
Indeed, employers, in this case Twitter, must bear the cost of the arbitration process. And having to process hundreds or thousands of cases at the same time could pose a significant financial and administrative burden for a company already facing a massive loss of advertising revenue. Each individual arbitration case can easily cost $50,000 to $100,000, Nendel-Flores says. “That is, in my opinion, a significant pressure point: the fact that Ms. Bloom and probably other plaintiffs’ attorneys are going to try to move these individual arbitration cases forward.”
Like most Twitter employees, Lee and the others had waived their right to be part of a class-action lawsuit when they accepted the job through a dispute resolution agreement that routed all legal complaints to arbitration. This meant that if they had a problem with the company, everyone would have to negotiate on their own. For an employer, such a legal mechanism blocks huge class actions. But for Twitter, faced with dozens of disgruntled former employees, this could lead to death by a thousand cuts.
And Bloom’s customers are not alone. Last week, Akiva Cohen, a lawyer representing another group of Twitter employees, informed the company that its clients would also sue in arbitration if the company did not “unequivocally confirm” that the former employees would receive the full severance packages they claim Twitter promised them.
“No one really expects to walk into a work environment, especially a new job that you’re really passionate about, thinking that you’re going to end up suing your employer one day or that your employer is going to treat you like a bitch. manner that merits legal action. action,” says Lee.
