After reports of Elon Musk’s plan to fire almost half of Twitter’s workforce, around 3,700 employees emerged, it was met with stark criticism. Now the social media giant has been sued over Musk’s plan, as the employees believe that the firing is happening without a lengthy notice and violates federal as well as California law.

As per Reuters, Elon Musk’s plan to fire almost half of Twitter’s workforce is supposed to take place on Friday, November 4, and an internal email was sent by the company to its employees on Thursday, November 3, informing them of it.

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Twitter was sued for a class action lawsuit on the same day in a federal court in San Francisco.

When the world’s richest person, Elon Musk, completed his takeover of Twitter, he soon fired several of the company’s top executives, including CEO Parag Agrawal, CFO Ned Segal and head of legal, policy, and trust Vijaya Gadde. Musk has maintained for some time that he wants to bring huge changes in how the company functions and to achieve that, he will have to let go of almost half of its existing workers.

The plaintiffs’ hope is that the federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act, which is designed to restrict big companies from firing large numbers of workers without prior notice of at least 60 days. While it has been sued, Twitter is yet to issue a statement regarding the lawsuit.

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The lawsuit which was registered in the San Francisco court on Thursday has requested an order which will force Twitter to heed the WARN Act. It has also requested the federal court to restrict the Elon Musk-owned company from forcing workers to sign documents that will see them surrender their right to sue the organization.

“We filed this lawsuit tonight in an attempt the make sure that employees are aware that they should not sign away their rights and that they have an avenue for pursuing their rights,” the attorney who sued Twitter, Shannon Liss-Riordan, said

This is the second time since June that the attorney sued an Elon Musk-owned company over related claims. Tesla Inc looked to lay off almost 10% of its total employees in June 2022, and Shannon Liss-Riordan sued the company at that time.

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However, a ruling said that the workers need to pursue the claims in a behind-the-doors arbitration, not in a federal court. At the time, Elon Musk called the lawsuit trivial during an interview with Bloomberg’s John Micklethwait.

“We will now see if he is going to continue to thumb his nose at the laws of this country that protect employees,” the attorney said.

“It appears that he’s repeating the same playbook of what he did at Tesla,” she added.