Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

Beijing, February 25 (Xinhua) Twitter boss Elon Musk (Elon Musk) repeatedly claimed that Twitter is on the brink of financial collapse. However, the cost of the company's legal battle with more than 1000 laid-off employees may be enough to cause it to collapse completely.

Shannon Liz-Shannon Liss-Riordan, a labor lawyer, said she had filed 1300 personal arbitration cases on behalf of Twitter employees who were fired shortly after Musk took over last year, and many more are being processed. The former Twitter employees, who were fired in November last year, said they had received a much better promise of severance pay than Mr Musk finally offered last month.

According to information provided by several law firms, the entire arbitration process usually costs about $100000. Companies often require employees to agree to resolve disputes in a private alternative rather than more public litigation. Arbitration fees are usually a burden on employers because employees usually cannot afford the high cost of what the employer essentially forces them to do.

Based on this calculation, Musk may need to spend more than $130 million (900 million yuan) to deal with arbitration cases submitted by employees so far. For Twitter, which Musk says is at risk of bankruptcy, the fee seems astronomical. To avoid bankruptcy, Mr Musk has been cutting costs, cutting headcount to its lowest level in more than a decade, abruptly shutting down a major data server, shutting down offices around the world and stopping paying rent.

"Twitter's employment agreement stipulates that these disputes will be arbitrated separately, so that's what we're doing," Lelden said. "We look forward to the day when Musk comes to his senses and realizes that paying the money owed to employees is a much cheaper thing."

Some former Twitter employees are working with other lawyers, including Lisa Bloom of law firm The Bloom Firm and Akiva Cohen of law firm Kamerman, Uncyk, Soniker & Klein. In addition, fired Twitter employees have filed several class-action lawsuits in US federal courts. In addition to some claims belonging to the protected class, these lawsuits also propose similar claims for severance pay for employees who have initiated arbitration.

In general, former Twitter employees said that the company's previous management had made it clear and repeatedly promised them that if they were fired after Musk took over, they received severance pay "equal to or higher than" two months' base salary, three months of stock ownership, pro rata bonuses and cash to pay for ongoing health insurance. This commitment is also included in the merger agreement signed between Musk and Twitter.

However, Musk offered only a month's base salary as severance pay for laid-off employees. He publicly claims to offer workers three months' salary as severance pay, but he seems to confuse it with the period of "non-work" employment in which thousands of employees are included. In the meantime, employees continue to receive wages. U. S. national labor law requires companies to give a certain period of notice in the event of large-scale layoffs.

In order to receive this month's severance payment, former Twitter employees must sign a separation agreement, waiving their litigation or arbitration rights and any bonuses or stock dividends. The agreement also effectively forbids them from talking about Musk, Twitter or their experiences at the company. Thousands of employees have chosen to refuse to sign the agreement, and many have consulted lawyers on how to deal with the severance pay agreement.

In any case, a new decision by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has determined that the confidentiality and non-disparagement provisions often included in severance agreements, like those granted to fired Twitter employees, violate the National Labor Relations Act. If the federal court upheld the NLRB's decision, it would effectively invalidate all such provisions in the severance agreement. Even the relatively few Twitter employees who have signed the exit agreement offered by Musk will be free to talk about Twitter in the future.

Welcome to subscribe "Shulou Technology Information " to get latest news, interesting things and hot topics in the IT industry, and controls the hottest and latest Internet news, technology news and IT industry trends.