The mass layoffs on Twitter last year apparently continue to cause trouble for the short message service. In November, Elon Musk gave his remaining employees a choice: “longer hours” or a severance package.
When offering severance pay to its former employees, the company is said to have used a service provider – some of whose emails ended up in the spam folder, reports the US tech magazine “Gizmodo”.
“In case you’re wondering about the current status of Twitter, a lot of people just got their breakup agreements in their spam folders,” a former Twitter employee tweeted over the weekend. A link in the email would have referred to a recent website that was not very trustworthy.
An insider confirmed to the magazine that Twitter’s human resources department had sent all ex-employees an email confirming the authenticity of the email. “We would like to confirm that we have engaged a third party, CPT Group, to assist us in distributing the Twitter Disconnection Agreements in the United States,” the statement said.
But even after receiving their severance offers, some ex-employees are dissatisfied, reports CNN. After taking over Twitter in October, Elon Musk announced severance payments of three months’ salary. According to the report, hundreds of former Twitter employees were “only offered a one-month severance package,” CNN quoted a lawyer representing ex-employees at the company as saying.
Even a severance payment of three months’ salary is well below the industry average, reports the US news channel. According to this, ex-employees of Facebook’s parent company Meta, which fired thousands of employees during the same period, received at least four months’ salary as severance pay.
Former Twitter employees are not allowed to ‘say anything negative’
Lisa Bloom, another lawyer who represents ex-Twitter employees, writes on the short message platform that the compensation offer is often linked to unusually strict conditions. They are designed to “silence workers for life”.
Accordingly, the dismissed would declare in a legally binding manner that they would not take any legal action against their ex-employer. They are also prohibited from testifying as witnesses in court proceedings against Twitter. Bloom describes the agreement “not to say anything negative about Twitter, its management or Elon” as a “coup de grace”.
Musk took over Twitter in October 2022 after a failed takeover attempt earlier that year.
Since then, thousands of employees have been laid off, blocked accounts have been reactivated and users of the short message service have complained about an increase in hate messages on the platform. Advertisers are turning away, the Twitter Blue subscription model is intended to increase revenue. (tsp)
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