MEXICO CITY (open).- Hundreds of Twitter workers are expected to leave this company after its new owner, billionaire Elon Musk, gave them an ultimatum to decide by Thursday at the latest whether to take days off work of “long hours at high intensities” or they leave.
A note from the British agency Reuters cites a report by the Blind application, a community in which employees of companies such as Uber, Amazon and Apple share their experiences anonymously, which indicates that 42 percent of Twitter’s 180 workers he chose the option to quit
A quarter said they “reluctantly” chose to stay, and just 7 percent of survey participants said they “clicked yes to stay, I’m adamant,” according to Blind.
According to Reuters, citing employees of the social network, Musk met with some of the best workers to try to convince them to stay.
Twitter has informed employees it will close its offices and stop accessing credentials until Monday, according to two sources. Security officers began evicting employees from the office on Thursday night, according to another source cited by the news agency.
According to technology sites, the closure of the offices is due to fear of sabotage by workers who reject the work culture that the Tesla owner wants to impose on the company founded by Jack Dorsey.
According to The Verge, Musk’s first priority as Twitter’s new owner has been to radically restore his work culture. In an email to employees this week obtained by that portal, Elon Musk wrote: “Moving forward, to build Twitter 2.0 and succeed in an increasingly competitive world, we will have to be extremely tough. This will mean working long hours at high intensity. Only outstanding performances will constitute a passing grade.
The closure of the offices and the exodus of employees coincides with the start of the World Cup in Qatar, in which heavy traffic from social network users is expected.
In Mexico, the trends #TwitterDown, Adiós Twitter and #RIPTwitter became popular this afternoon.
class action lawsuit
Chief Technical Officer Dmitry Borodaenko, who accused Twitter of firing him this week when he refused to come into the office for work, filed a class-action lawsuit against Elon Musk’s company on Wednesday in federal court in San Francisco, Calif. .
Borodaenko said Musk’s recent request for social media workers to return to work in person, be active for “long, high-intensity hours” or resign violates the federal Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), which requires employers to work to offer them reasonable options.
According to Reuters, there is little legal precedent for when remote work qualifies as a reasonable accommodation under the ADA, and ultimately the issue revolves around individual cases.
“As such, disability bias claims can be difficult to bring into a class action,” she said on social media.
The engineer is a cancer survivor and is particularly vulnerable to covid-19, according to the complaint.
The lawsuit seeks to represent the many Twitter employees with disabilities who have quit because they are unable to meet Musk’s rigorous performance and productivity standards, being required to work under unreasonable circumstances.
It notes that after completing the Twitter purchase, Musk said remote work was no longer allowed “with rare exceptions for ‘exceptional’ employees,” which discriminates against disabled employees who can do their jobs with or without reasonable accommodation, but whoever they were is not allowed to continue working, the lawsuit said.
In another complaint filed Wednesday in the same court, Twitter was accused of firing thousands of contract workers without giving the 60-day notice required by federal law.
The company is facing another possible class action lawsuit, also in a San Francisco court, where it is alleged to have violated that law by abruptly firing about 3,700 employees, half of the workforce.
Musk said he was offered three months of severance pay, longer than federal law states that employers can provide 60 days of severance pay instead of giving them notice.
