A federal judge in San Francisco has ruled that roughly 150 older workers who were laid off by social media platform X when Elon Musk acquired the company can sue for age discrimination as a group, exposing the company to millions of dollars in potential damages.
U.S. District Judge Susan Illston, in a decision released Tuesday night, said the case raised a common question about the impact a mass layoff at the company in 2022 would have on workers age 50 and older.
Plaintiff John Zeman, who worked in X’s communications department when the company was called Twitter, filed the suit in 2023. In his suit, he said X fired 60 percent of employees who were 50 or older and nearly three-quarters of those over 60, compared with 54 percent of employees under 50.
“Plaintiff has demonstrated beyond mere speculation that Twitter may have discriminated against older employees in the November 4, 2022 (mass layoff), constituting a single decision that affected all members of the proposed class,” Illston wrote.
Tuesday's ruling allows Zeman's lawyers to send notice of the lawsuit to potential class members, giving them the opportunity to opt in to the case.
X did not respond to a request for comment. The company has denied any discrimination and said it eliminated the entire communications department where Zeman worked after Musk took over, regardless of the age of those workers.
Shannon Liss-Riordan, a lawyer for Zeman and 2,000 other former Twitter employees who have filed a series of lawsuits against the company, said she was pleased with the ruling.
The lawsuit is one of a dozen that X has faced in the wake of Musk's decision to lay off more than half of Twitter's workforce in 2022.
Those cases include several claims, all of which X has denied, including that the company fired employees and contractors without the required advance notice, singled out women for layoffs and forced out workers with disabilities by banning remote work.
In August, two judges separately dismissed the sex and disability discrimination cases but allowed the plaintiffs to file amended complaints to further their claims.
Two other lawsuits claim the company owes its former employees at least $500 million (roughly Rs 4,199 crore) in severance pay. One of those lawsuits was dismissed in July.
© Thomson Reuters 2024
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