A lawsuit filed on Wednesday stated Twitter allegedly refused to pay at least $500 million in promised severance to thousands of employees who were laid off after Elon Musk acquired the company.
Courtney McMillian, who was Twitter‘s “head of total rewards” before being laid off in January, filed the proposed class action in federal court in San Francisco.
McMillian claims that under a severance plan implemented by Twitter in 2019, most employees were guaranteed two months’ base pay plus one week’s pay for each full year of service if laid off. According to the lawsuit, senior employees like McMillian were owed six months of base pay.
But Twitter only gave laid-off workers at most one month of severance pay, and many of them did not receive anything, McMillian claims, according to a Reuters report.
Twitter laid off more than half of its workforce as a cost-cutting measure after Musk acquired the company in October.
Twitter no longer has a media relations department. The company responded to a request for comment from Reuters with a poop emoji.