When Elon Musk’s Twitter abruptly laid off half its workforce at the start of November, the impact on its U.S. employees was immediate. But many of those in other countries with stronger employee protections were left fuming at Twitter’s apparent flouting of their national laws. Now some are pushing back—with varied degrees of success.
In Ireland, global vice-president for public policy Sinead McSweeney on Friday won a High Court injunction suspending her dismissal, and on Wednesday Twitter told the court it had restored her to her position. That may be taken as a positive sign by ex-Twitter staff fighting back elsewhere. In Germany, half a dozen of them have teamed up with a major trade union to get better terms from the company. And in Ghana, laid-off employees in Twitter’s only African office have formally protested to the government that the firm was trying to “silence and intimidate” them into accepting worse terms than they are due.
On Oct. 28, when Musk completed his acquisition of Twitter, the company had about 7,500 employees; it is not clear how many worked outside the U.S., though it was a small fraction of the total. Over the next couple of weeks, Musk laid off about half of the staff worldwide. More left voluntarily, and by the time Musk demanded on Nov. 17 that remaining staff agree to work very long hours at high intensity, only an estimated 2,900 were still around. Hundreds reportedly left following that demand, and the last reported total of remaining...
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