It’s been a pretty good holiday weekend for Elon Musk. Not only did SpaceX successfully launch its Falcon Heavy rocket on a secret mission for the U.S. Space Force yesterday, but a judge, on Friday, ruled in Twitter’s favor over a class-action lawsuit filed by a group of laid-off employees who were apparently unhappy with receiving “only” a month of severance pay.
The heart of the dismissed lawsuit seems to have stemmed from Musk’s comments that laid-off employees would be entitled to three months of severance pay. When he took over Twitter at the end of October, Musk systematically set about streamlining the platform’s bloated workforce and laying off an estimated 50 percent of employees. This, of course, did not sit well with the many woke ex-employees who had been happily ensconced in their cushy gigs, enjoying endless free lattes and juices from the company cafeteria and spending their days flitting about from one important “meeting” to another. Elon the Indestructible came in and put an end to all the fun.
Many of those who were part of the November 4th mass layoff received some form of severance in addition to continuing to collect their regular salaries through January 4, 2023. The lawyer representing the workers in the lawsuit said that many of the laid off hadn’t bothered to look for work because they expected the gravy train to keep running for several months. This generation seems to make every life lesson a really hard, painful one. A little foresight goes a long way.
Anyway, it’s pretty murky what kind of severance packages were actually offered to the laid-off employees, but HR matters are like that. It sounds like many employees signed arbitration agreements that affected what their final offers looked like. In finding in Twitter’s favor, US District Judge James Donato ruled that the former workers were unable to stray from their agreements and were explicitly not able to file class-action lawsuits.
In the wake of the judge’s ruling, Shannon Liss-Riordan, the aforementioned lawyer for the laid-off workers, has promised she’ll keep Twitter’s HR and legal offices busy by filing an excessive number of individual arbitration demands, stating, “Mass arbitrations are incredibly costly for companies to defend and many employers have found themselves sorry about what they wished for when they insisted that employees would have to pursue their claims one by one.”
This is what the left does; it’s straight out of Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals. They identify their target, they attempt to “push a negative” against their target and they keep the pressure on in the hopes their target will break. The embittered ex-employees and their lawyer clearly think tying Twitter up in arbitration will somehow strike a serious blow to Elon Musk, who has become their enemy simply because he values free speech. But, they’ve never been up against a foe like Musk, who really doesn’t seem to give a [bleep] about them and their hyperwoke agendas. The more they try to tear him down, it seems, the more powerful and influential he gets. They’re the ones building Elon the Indestructible and they don’t even realize it.