Twitter's shadow workforce sues over Musk's mass layoffs

Twitter Inc. was sued by contract workers who argue they were a "contingent workforce" with the same duties as employees and shouldn't have been laid off without notice when Elon Musk took over the company.

The class-action complaint filed Tuesday in San Francisco federal court is the latest legal fallout from Musk's rapid move in November to eliminate more than half of Twitter's head count just after he acquired the company for $44 billion.

The suit was brought on behalf of an unspecified number of workers hired by Twitter through employee staffing company TEKsystems Inc., which was also named as a defendant in the case.

"The employees Twitter paid through TEKsystems were not temporary employees," according to the suit. Instead, they were routinely told they would have the opportunity to become direct Twitter employees, and "are part of the same mass layoffs affecting employees directly employed by Twitter," according to the complaint.

The workers hired and paid through TEKsystems weren't given 60 days advance written notice when they were terminated, as required under federal and California law, according to the suit.

Twitter didn't specifically responded to a request for comment.

Representatives of TEKsystems had no immediate response to a request for comment.

The social media platform in January won a ruling requiring laid-off workers who had signed arbitration agreements to resolve their grievances about being cheated out of severance pay in closed-door hearings overseen by private judges instead of through a class-action suit in open court.

The case is Gadala v. Twitter, 23-cv-1595, U.S. District Court, Northern District of California (San Francisco).