X illegally fired employee who publicly challenged return-to-work plans | Hacker News Reader

X illegally fired employee who publicly challenged return-to-work plans

cnbc.com

84 pointsilikecinnamon139 comments

What happened to all the severance that Musk did not dole out?

On a related note, musk seems like an impossible guy to work for. He is super opinionated and does things on a whim over tweet, does not treat employees properly, over works them and there is proof that he doesn’t even give severance to fired employees. Why do people work for him, specifically Twitter? I can see he allure behind Tesla and spacex even though I heard similar stories from there

The problem with being brilliant is that you don't develop a good litmus test for the rare times when you're not right.

Or as Elon put it, https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4xIwP-65oD0

Rare?

Sure, he occasionally does the wrong thing but you're missing the context for all the times he's right. Nobody gives him credit for putting his shoes on the correct feet or remembering to get dressed after showering rather than before.

I think it's a bit unobjectively critical to suggest that Elon Musk doesn't make a lot of good decisions.

Either that or he's the luckiest person on the planet.

Of course, doing stupid things is also the problem with being stupid; Occam’s Razor probably points more to stupidity than brilliance in this instance.

It seems unambiguous that it was possible for X to get away with doing this if they were slightly less aggressive about it - set a reasonable RTO timeline instead of demanding people show up immediately, not go on witch hunts by scanning slack messages, etc. But X's new owner loves drama and wants to feel powerful, so we get this.

On the other hand you could also argue that they did get away with it, because multiple years of legal battles with the NLRB don't really count as much of a loss unless they result in big enough penalties to actually hurt the people who made these decisions.

All the best entrepreneurs love drama and want to feel powerful right

There is definitely a correlation between being psychopathic and CEO. I don't know if either is a direct result of the other or if it's a third quality, but the statistical correlation is certainly there and has been known for a while.

Yes, they could have not antagonized people, but that's not the problem. The problem is they fired workers for coordinating. In this case it was about RTO but it could have been about coordinating about anything, even a triviality. Workers have the right to coordinate, organize, and act together, formally or informally.

, NLRB alleges

Oh so even more likely then!

I'm not sure what your point is. It's important that reporting is accurate, and the judicial system has not even held a hearing on this yet, though you wouldn't know that by the title here.

Super deceptive title then.

God forbid people be expected to read the article's they comment on. In any case, moderation or OP edited the title from what is on cnbc. Finally, to answer your question - I trust the NLRB, and I distrust Elon Musk. The court of public opinion doesn't require me to sit around and wait for a proper verdict when I can put two and two together myself. If it's found that X is in the right? You can correct me then.

Would just like to add in an edit: why is this flagged? People need to relax a little.

HN is full of a lot of what I call "unnecessary pedanticism". It's not really worth worrying about as the article title was cut short because of title size limits. It was a reasonable take on what to do in that circumstance.

I’m confused at how it is that people actually think that an employer doesn’t have the ability to dictate to its employees where their working location will be. They did it in early 2020 when they sent us all home. You are not forced to work at the location they specify—your employment in the US is always at will, so just quit and find another gig that suits you.

The person wasn’t fired for refusing to work in a specific location, but organizing their coworkers against resigning in the face of various abuses and a de facto layoff. The latter is protected under US labor law while the former (depending on the circumstances or terms of their employment) is generally not.

If your employer made promises about work location and/or work hours, they can't just suddenly go back on those promises and demand that you immediately upend your entire life to comply. Even if your employment agreement said they are allowed to do that, it may not be legally enforceable.

What they can definitely do is say "anyone who can't show up to work in this office is getting laid off", and then perform a mass layoff in compliance with the law (N days advance notice and/or severance, etc).

Claiming that if you choose to dance to a puppeteer's tune no matter what kind of demands they make on short notice you have "effectively resigned" is not a healthy employee/employer relationship and any boss doing that should expect to get harassed by the NLRB.

This is all separate from the question of whether X retaliated against people for organizing, which is definitely an illegal thing to do.

Of course they can. Just the same as you can quit and expect them to go through the trouble of finding someone to replace you.

That is an individual one on one decision to terminate employment, which is different from a company wide email telling dozens or hundreds of people that they have "effectively resigned".

But did they do that? Employer changed a policy, if people individually complied with the company policy they continued their employment. If they didn’t comply, they were insubordinate and were fired. That seems like a one on one decision to me.

How many company policies can you intentionally break and maintain employment, at any company, pretty much anywhere?

Friend of mine is a PA, always wanted to move to Alaska. Found his dream job, signed offer, sold house, found school for kids, etc.

Phone call 48 hours prior to them moving. “The clinic has been sold to new owners and they are evaluating all finances and rescinding employment offers, including yours. They’ll give you 30 days to repay the relocation assistance”.

No, they gave him far more than that. Three months salary, closing costs for the house they’d bought in Alaska, and no relocation repayment.

Considering that healthcare is tied to employment in the US, a job change is high friction. Relocating ones family and life are as well. When companies change a policy like WFH to RTO they're asking a lot. And often it's a stealth layoff to avoid regulations.

Is it actually tied to employment? It seems you can easily keep paying your own after leaving a job these days.

Maybe only in this context for high paid tech jobs at big tech companies. But I doubt that this is possible on the salaries of most other jobs or locations outside big tech. The world outside this bubble is mostly different. Maybe highly paid finance jobs would be another exception

Getting an individual ACA plan is typically easier the less you make. You’ll typically be able to get a bronze plan for whatever you were paying for your share.

The ACÁ plans are largely trash such that you can easily end up paying more out of pocket than you would with a COBRA plan. Likewise, there are myriad issues with continuity of care when changing providers.

That’s absolutely untrue (unless you’ve paid significantly into your deductible, in which case COBRA may be the right way to go). Most HRA plans from your employer are virtually indistinguishable from what you can get on the exchange. While there can be continuity of care issues, every portal allows you to check that the plan your selecting covers critical doctors.

It’s further no different than any issue you’d face simply changing employers.

The clearest thing you learn working in healthcare is how poorly people understand the ACA.

By working in healthcare, do you mean actually healing the sick and injured or participating in the massively destructive sham that is the US health insurance industry? I find it’s the latter that larger defends the ACÁ because they profit from it at the expensive of other people’s misery.

Did you have something to say, or were you just looking to make some personal swipes and call me names?

Your comments about the ACA (you know there’s no accent on the word Act, right?) are hyperbolic nonsense.

No, I, like most Americans, just find it incredibly insulting to be lectured to about how “poorly [we] understand the ACA” after having spent untold hours dealing with all its nonsense, spending absurd amounts of money to be denied care, lied to and be given the run around by insurance companies, often during some of the most challenging moments in our lives. Likewise, I find it completely obnoxious when the same people describe themselves as working in “healthcare,” while directly profiting from the denial of it to others, often illegally, because they know the people they’re screwing don’t have the time and resources to fight back. Apologies for speaking so plainly, but if any of this is somehow surprising to you, you should wake up.

So you’re just here to tell me, without knowing what I do or who I am, that I’m evil and that I’m “profiting from the denial of care to others”?

Cool man, good talk.

So did you actively oppose it back in 2009? Because I seem to recall pretty active support regarding the Affordable Care Act back then, with many on the left suggesting it was the panacea to address the US healthcare woes.

A lot of us warned what a disaster it was going to be but we were told to sit down and shut up.

Good lord you must live in a bubble to think this is the common case.

It is. Why do you think it’s not?

Call it expensive or whatever you want. But don't tell me it's tied to your job.

Are luxury vacations tied to my job also? Are sports cars tied to your job in the US??

Words matter.

Yes/no. COBRA is indeed the law, so yes you will have the option to continue your health plan for awhile (how long can very but > 1 year), but it can be remarkably expensive to do so. Your now paying your portion, the employers portion, +2%. And you've just lost your source of income. For those of us with high paying jobs who have made good financial decisions, this is probably OK for a time. But an extended unemployment, or being in less good financial shape and it can be effectively unaffordable.

Stop paying COBRA, unless you have paid significantly into your deductible. You can immediately get an ACA plan on termination for, comparatively, pennies.

YMMV. When I was laid off earlier this year COBRA was only slightly more expensive than an equivalent marketplace plan. But agreed don't skip checking the marketplace!

Also be aware of the "COBRA gap". You have the option to (retroactively) opt into COBRA for 60-days, so depending on your situation it may make sense to do without insurance within the gap, and opt-in in the unlikely event something catastrophic happens before your new employers insurance kicks in.

Interesting - my COBRA opt-ins have always been much higher, but it’s also probably down to location.

And yes, totally agree - taking advantage of the 60 day gap can also be super helpful, especially if you’re not high risk.

One confounding factor in my case may have been that I was employed across the country from where I lived, so the COBRA coverage vs the state market were completely different markets.

They changed in office to work from home over a weekend. People adapted.

If I have an agreement with my employer to work at location X, and they decide I have to start working at location Y, they have that right, but I also have the right not to quit and force them to fire me, so I can collect unemployment. Laternatively, my employer could offer a severance package so that we part ways on friendly terms.

I am certainly under no obligation to resign.

This complaint has nothing to do with whether someone was told to work at x or x location anyway. The complaint is typical organizing/unionizing type stuff.

> The NLRB protects workers’ legal right to engage in “concerted activity,” which is when two or more coworkers band together to address workplace issues.

The girl allegedly tried to "organize" other workers on Slack by telling employees who were already planning to resign to "not quit but to get fired".

I was responding to the parent comment. The parent comment was likely just making an observation in general, not necessarily about the NRLB complaint.

I think the challenge will be for the employee to try and show that workplace conditions vs, WFH are so much worse to warrant organizing mass subordination as a way to improve it.

Honestly if it's just the two messages they listed where she:

> Tweeted: “Don’t resign, let him fire you. You gain literally nothing out of resignation.”

> posted on Slack: “Don’t, be fired. Seriously.”

This just reads like someone giving advice to workers so they can get more $$. Without some more context this sounds like some hard spin by NRLB as if she was "organizing" workers against a "workplace issue". But I guess forcing a company to fire people is a expression of labour rights or something.

Yeah that’s unconvincing to me of any real organizational effort. I also keep thinking in my head how showing up to an office wearing something other than pajamas by a 6 figure earner somehow constitutes a work environment worthy of a collective bargaining agreement in the first place.

My UAW belonging grandfather who worked standing up on an auto line for 5 decades would probably have been ecstatic to sit in a Herman Miller office chair and eat free snacks all day. He bargained for an extra dollar or two an hour, or a day off or two a month—that was what was important to him, not “the office buys a brand of oat milk that I don’t prefer” level of discomfort we see today.

> But I guess forcing a company to fire people is a expression of labour rights or something.

It is, yes; being fired vs resigning has impacts on unemployment insurance, for starters. Mass firings could involve EEO-related lawsuits while they would be much harder to prove if the affected employees "resigned." And mass firings of a sufficient number could trigger the WARN act for affected employees.

Assuming the cause leading to the mass firing was just. Losing a WFH benefit for a highly paid but small segment of society really doesn’t arise to the level of an injustice being done.

> I think the challenge will be for the employee to try and show that workplace conditions vs, WFH are so much worse to warrant organizing mass subordination as a way to improve it.

No, it won't be/ First, because its the NLRB that needs to make its case, but more significantly because the legal protection against retaliation for workplace organizing doesn't depend at all on a determination as to whether the organizing was "warranted" by how bad the situation was:

29 USC Sec. 157: "Employees shall have the right to self-organization, to form, join, or assist labor organizations, to bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing, and to engage in other concerted activities for the purpose of collective bargaining or other mutual aid or protection, and shall also have the right to refrain from any or all of such activities except to the extent that such right may be affected by an agreement requiring membership in a labor organization as a condition of employment as authorized in section 158(a)(3) of this title."

29 USC Sec. 158(a): "It shall be an unfair labor practice for an employer- (1) to interfere with, restrain, or coerce employees in the exercise of the rights guaranteed in section 157 of this title;"

And then the boy fired the girl for the legally protected activities of talking about work conditions and how they might improve them.

> and force them to fire me, so I can collect unemployment

Good luck with that. If your employer directs you to show up at a location to work and you choose to not show up, you are intentionally subordinate and in all likelihood your employer will dispute your unemployment claim.

The word "ability" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. You might want to specify what is wrong with challenging this "ability", in the case at hand, or maybe generally.

That’s one way of looking at it. Another way is to say that we were promised thus-and-such and now you’re (the company) reneging on that promise. We’re not going to quit, because even though you have the right, we think you’re wrong to go back on your word, and we’re going to try to change your mind.

> We’re not going to quit

Ok. So be fired then. If you want to put a termination taint your employment history for the same result, that is certainly your right.

Or you try to organize a collective response that maximizes your and your fellow employees’ power to influence the decision. That’s a legally protected response and is the entire point of the article.

That's not what X did that's illegal. They illegally fired workers for coordinating. That, illegally, suppresses unionization by suppressing all forms of coordinated action. Workers have a right to collective action, and to organize.

Flagged because the title of the post is missing a key verb phrase.

Flag the entire site for enforcing a very short headline length limit, like it's 1978 and we're reading it on an 80 character teletype. Must be a LISP thing.

Flag this comment for going against the "HN is the greatest" dogma

Flag this whole thread for misusing the flagging and also called the police to file a report on this. Expect some blue letters the next days, flaggers

I wish I could flag the entire site; alas, I cannot.

I can't stand the X name! Twitter was more than a name/product. What's the catch phrase for "tweet this" or "someone tweeted me that" in X? "X this" or "someone X'd me that"? so awkward!

*edit: came to comment on employee handling fiasco but got distracted with the name

*Second edit: Wrote "twit" instead of "tweet". Out of sight, out of mind I guess!

I like to resort to the portmanteau xeet for those occasions, I see it as my own little futile act of rebellion against the branding upgrade.

Funny how it sounds like -shit- mentally, hahaha

The name X is more appropriate, because pretty soon the company will soon be dead enough to have cartoon Xes for eyes.

X will be AXed indeed

You think the name is so important, yet after a decade you wrote twit and twitted... When it's actually tweet and tweeted. Shows you how subjective it all is that after a decade at the top of mind people can still get it wrong.

ohh you're right, my bad!! That goes to show how easy it is to ruin things like this.

If lots of people regularly make fun of your branding, then you have won the branding game. Your brand awareness cannot be higher, and you have joined the hallowed company of Micro$oft, Mickey D’s, Tarzhay, Whole Paycheck, and WhyCombinator.

I think there are still way more people forgetfully or even unknowingly calling it Twitter than there are people making fun of the name 'X'.

I still type 'twitter.com' in my browser multiple times a day. If I mention a tweet to someone, I'll say I saw it on Twitter. I have to make an effort to call it X and I don't feel like putting in the effort.

That’s what I meant. Twits, twats, and all of that stuff is part of the language now. X is so stupid you can’t make fun of it, really. Comparing Elon’s X obsession to thirteen year old boys is not funny because it’s self-evident. None of our X jokes will stick because they’re less surprising than reality.

I don't like it either. It also seems arrogant to me – something about squatting on an entire letter and trying to rebrand it for your company.

Just keep saying Twitter. The name change will inevitably be reverted when it's sold in a few years.

It will go down in history as "X, formerly known as Twitter."