Twitter scrambles to get onside with labour laws

Twitter was scrambling yesterday to get itself back in line with Irish labour law days after telling hundreds of its staff here last Friday that it was letting them go.

In an email to all staff on Thursday, Twitter said that employees not affected by the lay-offs would be notified via their work email addresses. However, staff who would be affected would be notified to their personal email addresses.

And that’s what happened, with many of those staff discarded by the new Musk regime finding out ahead of any notification as they were locked out of the work accounts when they tried to log on. They were, functionally, “terminated”.

It was classic Elon Musk — determined, decisive and regardless of the rules. Even before those emails were sent by the company, it was being sued in California for breaching rules that require 60-day notice in the event of mass redundancies.

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In a second email on Sunday to its former employees in Ireland, the company took a different tack.

“You have been notified that your role is potentially impacted or at risk of redundancy. This does not mean that your role will be made redundant, just that there has been a provisional selection of your role,” it said.

The company said staff would continue to be paid through a minimum 30-day consultation period but told them that they were not required to work during that time or to enter the office. It was confirmed that their access to office systems has been cut.

Leaving aside the management style that considers firing by email a standard corporate practice, the idea that Musk — who has made clear recently that he expects his staff to spend a minimum of 40 hours a week at their office desk — is happy for half his “active” workforce to sit around idle for a month or more is strange.

Musk, unsurprisingly, has form in this area, having already been sued over a similar mass firing at Tesla, a case he dismissed as “trivial” subsequently. In terms of weighing any penalty against his vast, albeit paper wealth, that might be accurate but he should still be held to account.