Clean cuts are massive. This Wednesday, Meta, the parent company of Facebook, announced the loss of 11,000 jobs, or about 13% of its workforce.
Last week, two Silicon Valley companies, Stripe and Lyft, announced large-scale layoffs, while Twitter, recently acquired by Elon Musk, just laid off half of its 7,500 employees. In late August, Snap, the parent company of the Snapchat app, cut about 20% of its workforce, or more than 1,200 employees.
These large-scale social plans intervene in a technology sector that has been severely affected by the economic crisis. They are also characterized by a certain form of brutality.
Forced to vacate offices within an hour
On Twitter, a simple email served as a letter of termination for thousands of employees as management locked down their business computers in the process and remotely.
Some were even ordered to leave the company offices within an hour… Others, on maternity or paternity leave, were also fired overnight. The employees in charge of these firings were later fired.
Seen from France, these collective dismissals cause astonishment since the rules in our country to separate from an employee are strict and scattered over time.
It must be said that labor legislation in the United States is in absolute terms much more “flexible” than in Europe.
“In the United States, unlike France, the employment relationship, with few exceptions, is not materialized by signing an employment contract and employment is said to be “at will”, that is, it is at the discretion of the employer, who can terminate it at any time without reason, without prior notice and without any particular procedure, except of course for abuse of rights, ”explains for BFM Business, Marion Kahn-Guerra, associate lawyer and specialist in legal work at the Desfilis firm. .
Elon Musk appears to have broken the law
“Thus, for example, the dismissal must not be discriminatory or constitute a retaliatory measure against a worker who has denounced the breaches of his employer,” he continues.
However, as the applicable regulations may differ from one state to another, there is a federal law that regulates collective dismissals.
“This is the WARN Act of 1988 (Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act) which establishes, in the case of collective layoffs, the obligation of employers with more than 100 employees to give 60 days notice, subject to exceptions ( for example, if the number of dismissals ranges between 50 and 499 and the number of dismissals represents less than 33% of the workforce)”, continues the specialist.
California, where Twitter and Facebook have their offices, applies the WARN Law “even with some additional restrictions since the rule applies to companies that employ at least 75 employees”, specifies Maître Kahn-Guerra.
In the case of Twitter, “it appears that some employees have decided to take legal action for Elon Musk’s violation of the WARN Act. Therefore, they could obtain the payment of the 60 days notice that should have been respected”, explains Marion. Kahn-War.
And in fact, a lawsuit has already been filed in federal court in San Francisco.
Source: BFM TV
