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Comment by ggm | Hacker News Reader

IANAL but is this legal?

No because it violates the WARN act. [1]

IANAL but if they paid 60 days severance as Musk promised, that might legally be considered 60 days of employment and would not violate WARN. But they didn't actually do that despite Musk's assertions.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_Adjustment_and_Retraini...

I find it interesting that the penalty for violating the WARN act basically seems to be paying the amount you would have had to pay if you followed the WARN act, and nothing additional. Seems like an incentive to ignore it.

The WARN act is to give employees time to find another job. Basically Elon has chosen to not get any labor in return for that 60 day notice

The OP is suggesting that there was no actual pay for that notice period.

Suggesting, but not making any actual claims if they have been paid through their 60 days or not. Seems like very relevant information

> But they didn't actually do that despite Musk's assertions.

I have a friend that worked at twitter and was laid off during the first wave. She received her full severance so I don't know where you're getting this.

Regarding where I'm "getting this," it's in the original tweet that this thread links to :-)

legal, yes. judicious, no.

Since you have the legal background can you explain how the CEO publicly stating in writing “Everyone exited was offered 3 months of severance, which is 50% more than legally required.” is not actionable at all? Also how is this definitely not a WARN act violation?

Blatantly lying in a public statement is not against the law, depending on the circumstances. Otherwise the man would already be in fairly deep trouble.

There is nothing to signify that he isn’t already going to be in fairly deep trouble. He has been sanctioned and fined for past violations based on his tweets, for example by the SEC.

To start, for it to be actionable you need evidence that someone wasn't paid for their 60 or 90 days

Of course severance is not required to be paid.

Once a severance agreement is agreed to, it is required to be paid. It is a legally binding contract in California. Employees who haven’t received their severance are likely to pursue Twitter legally, and their counsel has firm footing. “I don’t want to pay what I agreed to” is not a defense.

Ex Twitter folks should hurry up before they have to negotiate with a bankruptcy trustee.

> Once a severance agreement is agreed to

Where did you see it was agreed to? Not saying it's legal, but it seems like to me like that's the wrong angle. The angle is more in the "lying publicly about giving severance to all employees", and since IANAL I'm wondering what can be done about that.

It’s possible no paperwork was ever provided to folks (!) who were “laid off”, in which case these are going to end up in court as constructive dismissal cases. Hard to say until legal action is taken and it shows up in courtlistener. I am not a lawyer, but if I was one, I would file whatever I thought was most likely to succeed from an employment law perspective while Twitter has cash reserves left.

The lying works so long as you don’t run into a judge and a judgement. The odds are very low a judge looks favorably upon Twitter’s HR practices (which are, publicly no less, quite abusive). Will a judgement be obtained before Twitter is no longer a going concern? That’s to be seen.

I agree with you, and the obvious next upshot is that Musk moves Twitter HQ to a less employee-favorable state; doesn’t affect the present situation or any employees who are employed in CA, but nevertheless.

> Ex Twitter folks should hurry up before they have to negotiate with a bankruptcy trustee.

This, one hundred times over. Musk has been openly talking about bankruptcy. I'm shocked if only one commercial realtor has sued twitter over deliquency. Sue early, sue often, because Musk's wealth is locked behind a corporate veil and twitter just doesn't have that much in saleable assets.

Suing someone for delinquency usually requires issuing notice, so we're running down the clock right now. Give it a few weeks. As of the beginning of Q4 Twitter still had a billion in cash that is rapidly shrinking.

Musk personally may not have a lot of wealth given that his lifestyle has been funded with loans secured against his Tesla stock, now almost worthless. There's also a lawsuit against his stock based compensation set to begin on 17th Jan, so that will be fun too.

This probably crazy, but is it possible that the whole kerfuffle about making it harder to track Elon's jet was just to make it harder to serve him with legal papers?

Nah, people who want to serve him papers have plenty of options (including the public information the ElonJet posts were sourced from!).

Most likely, he's just (barely?) smart enough to recognize that it's a really bad look for the CEO of an electric car company to be using a private jet all the time.

> smart enough to recognize that it's a really bad look for the CEO of an electric car company to be using a private jet all the time.

I honestly doubt that has anything to do with his reaction. He's gotten very paranoid over the last year or two I think he's mostly just scared of people stalking him.

> I was laid off 2 months ago and I’ve never even seen a severance letter

Sounds like he never got any documents to even begin to agree to it....

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