A federal decide in San Francisco has dominated that roughly 150 older employees who had been laid off by social media platform X when Elon Musk acquired the corporate can sue for age discrimination as a category, exposing the corporate to tens of millions of {dollars} in potential damages.
US District Decide Susan Illston in a call launched late Tuesday stated the case introduced a standard query over the influence {that a} 2022 mass layoff on the firm had on employees 50 and older.
Plaintiff John Zeman, who labored in X’s communications division when the corporate was referred to as Twitter, sued in 2023. He stated in his lawsuit that X laid off 60 p.c of workers who had been 50 or older and practically three-quarters of those that had been over 60, in contrast with 54 p.c of workers youthful than 50.
“Plaintiff has proven past mere hypothesis that Twitter might have discriminated in opposition to older workers within the November 4, 2022 (mass layoff), which constitutes a single determination that affected all members of the proposed class,” Illston wrote.
Tuesday’s ruling permits Zeman’s legal professionals to ship discover of the lawsuit to potential class members, giving them an opportunity to choose into the case.
X didn’t reply to a request for remark. The corporate has denied participating in discrimination and has stated it eradicated all the communications division the place Zeman labored after Musk took over, no matter these employees’ ages.
Shannon Liss-Riordan, a lawyer for Zeman and about 2,000 different former Twitter workers who’ve introduced a sequence of authorized claims in opposition to the corporate, stated she was happy with the ruling.
The lawsuit is one in all a couple of dozen X has confronted stemming from Musk’s determination to put off greater than half of Twitter’s workforce in 2022.
These instances embrace varied claims, all of which X has denied, together with that the corporate laid off workers and contractors with out the required advance discover, focused ladies for layoffs, and compelled out employees with disabilities by banning distant work.
In August, two judges individually dismissed the intercourse and incapacity bias instances whereas permitting the plaintiffs to file amended complaints fleshing out their claims.
Two different lawsuits declare the corporate owes former workers at the very least $500 million (roughly Rs. 4,199 crore) in severance pay. A kind of instances was dismissed in July.
© Thomson Reuters 2024
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