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Comment by hn_throwaway_99 | Hacker News Reader

When do they start straight up garnishing X's bank accounts? This behavior is so shitty, indefensible and beyond absurd. I think we need stronger laws that force billionaires to pay when they think the rules just don't apply to them - it's clear they often feel that the sheer expense of the legal system is often a deterrent for poorer folks to get what they are owed.

I hope all these folks get their severance, and hopefully with interest, legal fees and penalties.

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There needs to be criminal consequences for company officeholders.

If you are wilfully withholding pay then it should be mandatory jail time.

Legislation is underway here in Australia for such an approach after 7/11 et al systemically withheld pay knowing that the financial consequences weren't going to personally affect them.

We don't have debtors prisons. While there are specific cases like this where some jail time would seem just, overall it's a negative for society. It's a civil matter for a reason. I do think such cases should rip the corporate veil to shreds though, and the billionaires would have to pay up.

> We don't have debtors prisons.

No one's suggesting such.

We have plenty of disputed behavior and harms that are within the purview of civil courts, and then more egregious versions that are crimes. IMO, withholding significant pay that you have the ability to pay and is unambiguously contractually owed causes pretty serious harm, and society has strong reasons to criminalize this conduct.

Accepting services from someone while having no intent to honor the contract, hoping that disproportionate resources will prevent them from enforcing the contract "feels" like fraud: so let's codify it.

Exactly: we already have plenty of areas where a civil case can turn into a criminal one like fraud (just ask Elizabeth Holmes).

Saying "we'll pay you severance" with 0 intention to do so sure sounds like fraud to me.

Wage theft and fraud are crimes that state attorneys general do prosecute.

https://www.atg.wa.gov/news/news-releases/attorney-general-f...

Not paying severance is not wage theft. Severance was not included in Twitter's employee contract.

> Severance was not included in Twitter's employee contract.

It likely was once promises were made to continue to pay severance for at least one year, and employees relied upon this promise (instead of immediately seeking to work elsewhere).

The kind of technical loophole that America's law system seems to be riddled with (and the "akshually" crowd kinda loves to play with)...

It's not technically wage theft, in spirit it's pretty similar to wage theft since the termination of employment contracts had severance payment as a clause.

Potato, potato.

Severance is typically not "unambiguously contractually owed." The fact that many here would want company executives imprisoned for not offering goodwill boggles my mind.

It may not be owed but it was promised, presumably in legally enforceable documents that would have been used if the former employees broke the terms of severance.

No, they should be imprisoned for misleading, by defrauding. The "goodwill" was promised, in legal documents, and not fulfilled, that same goodwill is a major leverage against the employee, if such a promise was made you will take life decisions differently than if there was no such promise, when that promise is broken and your life is affected (as in: you'd move somewhere else and try a different venture, now you can't because you need to look for a job right now) then it's a fraud and a billionaire should really suffer just due to the power imbalance in the equation.

The fact that you are defending this practice makes me almost want to ask you how do their boots taste like...

> overall it's a negative for society

I would disagree.

We shouldn't allow criminal behaviour to be tolerated just because it's white collar.

And the whole point of laws is to protect the vulnerable in our society which definitely includes the innocent employees who are being harmed for doing nothing other than working for Twitter/X.

How is it criminal behavior to not offer severance, which 99% of companies don't offer? Not offering severance has nothing to do with criminal behavior. If so, 99% of small businesses owners would be imprisoned in your world.

You're responding to something not in the parent comment.

"Protect the vulnerable" there probably means enforcing contractual obligations to pay severance that was promised, not to offer severance in the first place.

Elon? Is that you?

The purchase contract had language in that that current twitter employees would be paid out severance via the then current twitter standards. He signed said contract.

He also publicly promised severance to all employees he laid off, when laying them off, then tried to back out of it after the fact.

So we have both contract law and public statements that he owes severance to thousands of people, and now is just refusing to pay. What kind of behavior is that?

Why do you keep posting stuff like this, when people are very clearly not arguing this?

Nobody believes that executives should be jailed for not offering severance - that's not what is being discussed. But if part of a termination agreement includes a guarantee of severance (and these termination agreements basically always include responsibilities for the employee to uphold in order to receive that sentence), and then you just decide not to pay it, and it looks like you basically never had the intent to pay it, that looks a lot more like fraud.

Until corporate personhood means Twitter/X can be thrown in jail, I don't think debtors prisons are relevant.

> When do they start straight up garnishing X’s bank accounts?

Well, they have to lose the cases before people can start enforcing judgements.

X is not paying their bills either from the sounds of it. Musk should be on the streets already.

Well, yeah, both the Connecticut case that is the primary reason for this article and the generally similar (but somewhat broader in terms of the kinds of wrongs raised) San Francisco case are not just about the initial violations by Twitter, but Twitter’s alleged failure to pay the arbitration fees required by the arbitrator they have required people to use in place of going to court, which is claimed to have stalled all the arbitration cases (and which is the basis for bringing the dispute to court, despite the binding arbitration agreement which would normally foreclose that.)

Is it possible for someone else to fund the arbitration fees so they can proceed without Twitter’s participation? Similar to how Peter Thiel financed the destruction of Gawker via Bollea v. Gawker. Ideally, you get to a judgement as quickly as possible (by any means necessary) before Twitter’s insolvency, even if someone else has to front whatever Twitter was in the hook for to proceed with arbitration.

Arguably Twitter's refusal to honor the arbitration agreement should just invalidate the agreement and allow these to proceed as a class action.

Strongly agree, but if it’s faster to cough up $3M to force arbitration to start while the enterprise still has value to extract vs waiting for a court to force it because of the bad faith actions of stalling, leaving you with potentially no enterprise value to extract when a court renders a judgement, that might make the path forward more obvious.

Regardless, I hope whatever actions are taken make the plaintiffs whole.

Of course when the shoe is on the billionaires foot, the workers are immoral: https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2023/05/16/elon-musk-work-from-home...

Our culture is joke, bleating about how free we are. Some freedom from a mathematical minority would be nice.

We need term limits on all forms of social influence.

In general, there should be prompt payment legislation.

My family used to be in food processing. The grocers (except Walmart, which is one of the reasons they can get lower prices), will straight up just not pay by the date specified in the contract and will make you hound them.

This is just contract law. When I managed vendor contracts I had to specify the terms of payment (net30, etc) and penalty for late (2%, etc).

So there’s already legislation that enforces contracts. I’m not sure how you would make a law that was helpful to force prompt payment clauses specifically.

It’s important to only accept terms that you want. And if your customers keep paying late, then collect your penalty charges and negotiate for higher penalties next time.

Most vendors will pay on the absolute last day possible so if the terms are net30, they will pay on the 30th day.

Power imbalances still exist. The problem is, if I have a contract with Google that is 80% of my small business revenue and they pay me late, what recourse do I have? It's a constant negotiation of who has the willingness to walk away. If they pay me late, I'll likely not complain because the money is big for me. I don't want to rock the boat.

Now if the gov told Google they could receive a massive fine for paying late, they would stop doing it.

My primary point is that there should be much, much quicker resolution of these cases, and when the facts aren't in doubt (e.g. contract says I delivered X, and if I did, I have the right to garnish wages/bank accounts/etc.) there should be a much faster pace to start requiring that the deadbeat pays up.

Taking the Twitter case, a lot of these folks were laid off nearly a year ago. Why is this still going on? Is there anything that could be more cut-and-dry: they were promised severance, in writing, in their termination agreements, and they haven't received it. As far as I'm aware there are 0 facts that are actually in dispute (save some of the highest up execs that were basically fraudulently fired "for cause", but that's a different story).

If Twitter wants to continue not paying them, they should have to file for bankruptcy, otherwise the laid off workers should get to take it straight from the Twitter bank accounts at this point.

> I hope all these folks get their severance, and hopefully with interest, legal fees and penalties.

I wonder what percentage the legal team will take. I doubt this is happening pro bono.

Sounds like a good argument for Twitter/X to have to pay the legal fees; the laid off employees should get their full severance, and in order for that to happen, they shouldn't have to spend it on the lawyers

And it certainly should not be pro bono.

It is a serious amount of work to take people to work, requiring years of education and a ton of skill. Particularly when the opposition has pockets as deep as X/Twitter/Musk.

Hopefully there are large damages that go to those who have been wronged in addition to restitution and repayment of the legal fees

I can not understand why some body like Musk who has such as easy ability to do the right thing would instead choose a far loser costly and damaging right. It's absolutely idiotic, absolutely damaging to the word as a whole, and fuck Musk. Only the worst sort of shit bag steals money at this level. If somebody steals baby formula out of desperation, they will feel far more drastic legal consequences than Musk will.

I'm guessing that lawyers are perhaps the one group that Musk pays on time, so he doesn't have to pay up elsewhere.

A certain former president has shown that you don't even need to do that!

A judgment would include legal fees, and depending on the state, X might be on the hook for triple damages. Plenty of money to go around, they just need to win in court.

Elon: I want X to be the next network people trust to transfer money

Also Elon: Let’s not pay any of Twitter’s bills

When a large corporation or wealthy person doesn't pay bills on time it's called managing cashflow.

When a peon does it he's a deadbeat.

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