About a week after Elon Musk assumed control of Twitter on Oct. 28, 2022, the social media platform stirred up a storm of controversy by abruptly firing about half of its 7,500 employees.
Within a few days, according to media reports, the company had asked some of those recently departed staffers to resume working – reinforcing a general impression of sloppy management. Musk’s brash approach as an employer also raises an important question about U.S. labor rights: Is it legal to terminate thousands of workers with little or no warning?
The courts may have a chance to weigh in, since several of those mass-fired workers have already filed a class-action lawsuit. They allege that Twitter broke federal and state laws for failing to give them the advance notice required.
But as a scholar of employment law and policy, I believe that Twitter’s new management team is probably not going to face much legal fallout for dismissing half its workforce. That’s because “at-will employment” – in which employers may fire an employee at any time for any legal reason, and their workers are also free to quit without facing legal consequences – is the foundation of U.S. labor laws.
Courts began to enshrine the at-will doctrine in the 19th century, making exceptions only for employees with fixed-term contracts. In Payne v. Western & Atlantic Railroad Co., the Tennessee Supreme Court ruled that a railway foreman in Chattanooga had the right to forbid his...
U.S. President Donald Trump launched a new artificial intelligence chatbot on Tuesday, calling it “damn good.” Turns out that one of the things it’s reasonably good at is debunking Trump’s own lie...