Written by Daniel Wiessner
(Reuters) – A federal judge in San Francisco has ruled that nearly 150 older workers who were laid off by social media company X when Elon Musk acquired the company can sue for age discrimination as a class action, exposing the company to millions of dollars. damage.
US District Judge Susan Illston in a ruling issued late Tuesday said the case presented a similar question about the impact of the company's 2022 layoffs on workers age 50 and older.
Plaintiff John Zeman, who worked in X's communications department when the company was called Twitter, sued in 2023. He said in his case X laid off 60% of workers aged 50 or over and about a third were over 60. , compared to 54% of workers under 50.
“Plaintiff has demonstrated beyond mere speculation that Twitter may have discriminated against older employees in the November 4, 2022 (mass layoff), 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 an opportunity to join the lawsuit.
UX did not respond to a request for comment. The company has denied that it discriminates against them and said that it eliminated the entire communications department where Zeman worked after Musk took over, regardless of the age of those employees.
Shannon Liss-Riordan, the lawyer for Zeman and about 2,000 other former Twitter employees who brought a series of legal claims against the company, said he was pleased with the decision.
The lawsuit is one of nearly a dozen X faced as a result of Musk's decision to lay off more than half of Twitter's workforce by 2022.
Those lawsuits include a variety of claims, all of which X denies, including that the company laid off workers and contractors without the required advance notice, targeted women for layoffs, and fired disabled workers with long layoffs.
In August, two judges separately dismissed the bias and disability claims while allowing the plaintiffs to file amended complaints accompanying their claims.
Two other lawsuits say the company owes former employees at least $500 million in severance pay. One of the cases was dismissed in July.
