Twitter began laying off half its workforce last week, a move by new owner Elon Musk to cut costs at the social media company, now $13 billion in debt due to his heavily leveraged purchase of the site.
In the U.S. the cuts were swift, as affected workers were notified by email and locked out of their company accounts. But in other parts of the world where Twitter has employees, the reductions are likely to drag out for longer, as the company must navigate various foreign labor regulations that tend to grant workers stronger protections against termination. This is particularly true in the U.K. and E.U., where the company had several hundred employees as of last year.
Legal and human resources experts say Twitter will have to be careful not to skirt labor laws abroad while laying off workers, as it could make an already expensive process even costlier.
When it comes to labor protections, “there’s the U.S. and everybody else, with Europe being the most stringent,” said Daniel Waldman, an international employment law partner at Seyfarth, based in New York. Typically, if companies want to lay off workers, they have to prove they’re doing so for the economic wellbeing of the company, a common theme in most countries outside of the U.S., said Waldman. From there, the rules for firing workers can vary greatly depending on their location.
“The process of dismissing people abroad is extraordinarily complicated and differs by country,” he said.
In the U.K., for example, where...
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