Twitter is getting sued again by his former employees – this time for alleged refusal to pay expected costs of legal arbitration. As before indicated by Bloomberg, the lawsuit was filed July 3 in the Northern District of California. It’s trying to force Twitter to cover most of the costs in a slew of arbitration claims, which of course Twitter doesn’t want to do.
This latest lawsuit is part of a slew of lawsuits between Twitter and many of the thousands of employees it abruptly laid off when Elon Musk took over last year. Laid-off employees have previously sued Musk for not giving enough notice before firing them.
But the laid-off employees were forced to drop the class action lawsuit in January in favor of individual arbitration, thanks to a provision in their contracts. The contract requires them to use JAMS, a professional arbitration services firm, and JAMS in turn requires both parties to abide by a set of rules posted on its website.
The employees’ attorney was quick to point out that they would already started filing arbitration claims. But now those claims are in limbo. As part of JAMS’ compensation scheme, the employees are on the hook for a “relatively nominal” filing fee, which costs $2,000 for a two-party arbitration, with Twitter taking the rest. Twitter responded by asking JAMS to split costs equally between Twitter and hundreds of employees who applied from outside of California — a violation of the JAMS conditional minimum standards of procedural fairness.
JAMS declined, saying it would not arbitrate for cases that did not meet those standards. Twitter, the complaint says, refused to comply with that condition in most states outside of California. JAMS bowed out of each case when Twitter said it would not pay required fees for — some of which already had hearings — saying it would “close its file because JAMS will not proceed with cases that we have determined are below our minimum standards.” fall for employment” if Respondent will not adhere to those standards.”
This puts employees in a tight spot. With the requirement to use JAMS, but Twitter’s refusal to abide by the terms of the arbitration group, the employees must agree to “wait out from applying the minimum standards” or they won’t be able to proceed without legal intervention . If they waived those standards, they would be responsible for a significantly larger portion of JAMS’ fees, which can be significant; according to a 2017 article from the American Bar Association’S Dispute resolution magazineJAMS’ services can range from $300 per hour to over $15,000 per day.
In most cases, arbitration is a bad deal for employees because it takes away a great deal of legal flexibility in cases where things go wrong. But it turns out that when you cheat thousands of employees, hundreds of individual arbitration cases can quickly overwhelm your company’s attorneys, like Twitter’s own attorneys. recorded last month.
Shannon Liss-Riordan, one of the lawyers for the employees named in the letter, said The edge via email: “The reason we had to file nearly 2,000 individual arbitration demands is because Twitter forced us – by forcing arbitration. Now that he has made his bed, he no longer wants to lie in it.”
Twitter, led by Elon Musk, is trying to pull out of all sorts of financial commitments. From internal communications services to cloud service subscriptions to physical office space, stories keep bubbling up about the company’s attempts to cut corners and save as the platform continues to decline, forcing many of its users to move elsewhere.
When asked for comment, Twitter responded with its usual poop emoji.
