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She was weeks away from her maternity leave on Twitter, until Elon Musk took over

2023-03-06T18:24:22.023Z


Twitter employees endured a corporate circus like no other, from Musk's threats to back out of the deal to mass layoffs.


New York (CNN) -- 

Bim Ali was in the early weeks of her first pregnancy when billionaire Elon Musk agreed to acquire Twitter, where she worked as an engineer with the Redbird core technologies team.

In the months of intense uncertainty that followed, Ali stayed with the company, trying not to think about the torrent of news about the bumpy deal, to focus on her health and that of her baby.

“I was really happy, I loved my team and I loved contributing,” Ali said.

“She was also pregnant so [leaving] didn't make sense on any level,” as maternity leave might not be guaranteed as a new hire at another company, she said.

But in November, shortly after Musk finalized the acquisition and weeks away from the start date of her five months of maternity leave, Ali was fired as part of the first round of massive cuts under the new ownership.

Jan. 4 was the official termination date of Ali's employment with Twitter, leaving her without the health insurance the company provided for her and her family.

Her baby was born a week later.

Two months after her layoff, she has yet to begin her search for a new job and is spending time with her newborn.

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“But I don't have the financial support that I had planned,” he said.

“We have to figure out a way to stay afloat.”

Ali is one of thousands of current and former Twitter employees whose lives have been turned upside down since Musk began buying shares in the social media company early last year.

Twitter employees endured a corporate circus like no other, including Musk's threats to back out of the deal, his public spats with Twitter executives, the potential for a high-profile lawsuit between Twitter and Musk, and the termination of the deal accompanied immediately by rumors of mass layoffs.

Bim Ali, seen here at Twitter's San Francisco headquarters in March 2022, was officially fired on January 4, a week before the birth of her first child.

“I am not receiving the financial support that she had planned,” she said.

Courtesy of Bim Ali

Following the Twitter acquisition, Musk cut more than half of his staff and proceeded to fire and fire even more employees, while repeatedly warning that Twitter could go bankrupt.

Twitter reportedly now has fewer than 2,000 employees after further cuts last month, up from 7,500 before Musk took over.

Former workers who spoke to CNN said the past year felt like a jolt: They went from working for a company whose culture they loved with a corporate mission they believed in, to looking for a new job and worrying about the future of the platform. under Musk's leadership as he restored inflammatory accounts and alienated advertisers.

One former employee told CNN after the December layoffs that they felt like they were mourning what had been their "dream job."

Many employees are now reeling from more generous severance pay that they say was promised but never materialized.

While some have found work quickly, others have had to deal with a tech job market that is at its bleakest in recent memory.

And, in some cases, workers are juggling the uncertainty of unemployment with disability or illness, as well as pregnancy, parental leave or other family obligations, according to former employees who have spoken with CNN and legal lawsuits filed against the company.

  • The chaos on Twitter becomes evident to the public as Musk argues and fires employees through tweets

"I wasn't a software engineer or an executive," says Michele Armstrong, a former senior audio and video engineer who was laid off seven months after joining the company.

"I was making a decent salary in San Francisco, but if I don't find another job, I'm going to have to move out of my apartment because it paid me just enough to live in San Francisco... but I wasn't one of the people who could save a lot of money."

Armstrong says he is now looking for work in the tough tech job market and dipping into his retirement savings to help pay the rent.

View of the Twitter headquarters in San Francisco, California, on February 8.

(Photo: Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)

Armstrong and Ali are among more than 1,500 former employees who have taken legal action.

Former Twitter employees have filed arbitration claims and four class action lawsuits against Twitter seeking additional damages they allege were promised by the company before Musk acquired it.

Some former employees have also alleged discrimination based on gender and disability and other issues, which the company has argued in court to be unsubstantiated.

"One person can affect our way of life and unfortunately we are seeing the negative effects of the way Twitter is run," Ali said.

Twitter has requested that all four class action lawsuits be dismissed, arguing that their firings were lawful and that employees should pursue their claims in arbitration.

A judge last month ruled in favor of the company that at least some workers could not bring their claims through a class action lawsuit and had to do so through arbitration.

Twitter has not commented publicly on the arbitration claims, but Shannon Liss-Riordan, the attorney representing hundreds of former Twitter employees, filed a lawsuit last month accusing the company of failing to cooperate with the arbitration process. arbitration.

Twitter, which laid off much of its media relations team last year, did not respond to a request for comment for this story.

  • ANALYSIS |

    With its advertising business in crisis, Twitter relaxes the ban on political advertising

"Nothing to worry about"

Armstrong was in onboarding sessions for a new job at Twitter, which he called his "unicorn company," the day news broke that Musk had agreed to buy the company.

"It was very welcoming," Armstrong says of the company.

"They respected me, and I hadn't had that anywhere else working in technology."

But in the months after Musk's April offer to buy Twitter, employees witnessed near-daily news coverage about their employer and a wide range of questions about the acquisition, from uncertainty about the billionaire's financing to concerns about his "free speech" vision for the platform.

Michele Armstrong, a former audio and video engineer, was laid off seven months after joining Twitter.

Armstrong says she is now looking for a job and dipping into her retirement savings to help pay the rent.

Credit: CNN

"We were on the roller coaster of Twitter, the Elon Musk chapter, for seven months," Ali said.

"And during that time, he was in, he was out, it was happening, it wasn't happening, we might have been bought off by some other faction, there were so many rumors, so many opinions."

Of the many rumors circulating about Musk's plans for Twitter, former employees say the biggest internal question was whether Musk would carry out layoffs after his acquisition.

But the former employees say they calmed down after a meeting in June in which Musk responded to a question about layoffs by telling Twitter workers that "anyone who is obviously a significant contributor should have nothing to worry about."

"I thought, well, then I have nothing to worry about because I'm an important contributor," said Armstrong, adding that she had previously considered starting to look for another job but "then he said that and it sort of changed my mind."

Like Ali, some employees said that even if they wanted to leave, it just didn't seem like an option for personal reasons.

Other workers were open to the idea of ​​working for Musk, one of the world's most famous entrepreneurs, despite his reputation as a controversial figure on Twitter and uncertainty surrounding his plans for the platform.

"Twitter has never been a perfect company...so I welcome that approach, not necessarily contrary, but certainly different," said Justine de Caires, a former software engineer who was the lead plaintiff in a class action lawsuit filed against Twitter. shortly after the mass layoffs in November and is now pursuing arbitration claims against the company.

"I think we certainly could have learned something from Elon."

Former Twitter employee Justine De Caires walks toward the entrance of a federal courthouse in San Francisco, Thursday, Dec. 8, 2022. De Caires is one of several former Twitter employees who has taken legal action against the company following the mass layoffs. that came after Musk took office.

Credit: Jeff Chiu/AP

By contrast, Twitter employees say they heard very little from their new leader in the days immediately after he took office.

De Caires spent the first week under Musk working on Twitter Blue, the subscription service that Musk wanted to revamp as part of his urgent effort to increase revenue.

At one point, De Caires said they worked through the night to help with the effort.

Armstrong said that one night the first week she was called from the office at 8 p.m. to help set up audio and video equipment in a conference room in an office building that the company was about to close because the new management wanted to hold meetings there.

A week after his inauguration, Musk fired about half of Twitter's staff via email, leaving employees out of work — and at least some confused about whether they could look for new jobs without risking their severance pay. — just before the holidays.

In the weeks that followed, Musk continued to fire more employees, even asking those who remained to commit to working "very hard" or resign.

Musk had denied reports before his acquisition that he planned to cut 75% of jobs at Twitter in order to cut costs, but he did indeed end up doing something similar with several rounds of staff reductions in the past four months.

"Disappointing" severance pay

In lawsuits and arbitration claims, numerous former Twitter employees have alleged that the company had promised that, if any layoffs occurred after the Musk takeover, severance payments would be at least equal to those offered before the takeover, including two months' base salary. , three months of accelerated share acquisition, annual bonuses, and continued health insurance coverage.

Instead, Twitter offered terminated employees only one month's severance pay upon termination, beyond the notice period required by state and federal law.

That's far less than at rival companies like Meta, which laid off thousands of workers at the same time as Musk's first cuts and guaranteed them 16 weeks of base pay plus an additional two weeks for every year they worked at the company.

And for at least some former employees, the severance offer landed in their spam folder, according to public tweets and former employees who spoke to CNN.

Attorney Shannon Liss-Riordan represents some 1,500 former Twitter employees who have taken legal action against the company following the Musk acquisition.

Credit: Jeff Chiu/AP

“Many Twitter employees contacted me to say that they had trusted the company's previous promise of compensation.

They were nervous during all that uncertain time last year, when it wasn't clear what was going to happen to the company, and Twitter management didn't want to lose their workforce in the meantime, so to keep people there, they did these promises," Liss-Riordan explained to CNN.

Some former employees say severance promises from the company had encouraged them to stay with the company last summer amid the uncertainty surrounding the Musk acquisition, only to regret it as the tech industry entered its steepest decline ever. recent memory later in the year.

"It would have been nice to spend time on a substantially better technology market while it was still around," says de Caires.

"The market is hot crap right now. I sat down earlier in the week after a wave of rejections and thought, maybe I should be a firefighter or something...because tech jobs don't exist."

De Caires said that about half of his severance pay had consisted of buying shares, so losing that part of the severance package meant losing a lot of additional money.

She and other workers now hope to recover those alleged losses through their arbitration claims.

"A lot of us try really hard because we love the company and we like to outdo ourselves," Ali told CNN.

"I think there were a lot of great workers on Twitter (...) we were part of a global movement to tell the whole world what's happening, how it's affecting you locally, how it's affecting you nationally, how it's affecting you affecting globally. And I think we should all be fairly compensated for what we did."

Source: cnnespanol

All news articles on 2023-03-06

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