Former employers of Twitter Africa HQ are threatening the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, with a lawsuit over how they were fired from the company.
Elon Musk after his acquisition of Twitter undertook a mass laying off of Twitter employees which affected the company’s staff based in Ghana.
Now, the laid-off employees at Twitter’s Africa headquarters are accusing Twitter of “deliberately and recklessly flouting the laws of Ghana” and trying to “silence and intimidate” them after they were fired.
Accordingly, the team has hired a lawyer and sent a letter to the company demanding it comply with Ghana’s labour laws, provides them with additional severance pay and other relevant benefits, in line with what other Twitter employees will receive.
In a report by CNN, they also petitioned the Ghanaian government to compel Twitter to “adhere to the laws of Ghana on redundancy and offer the employees a fair and just negotiation and redundancy pay”.
The letter addressed to Ghana’s Chief Labour Officer, also stated that “it is clear that Twitter, Inc. under Mr Elon Musk is either deliberately or recklessly flouting the laws of Ghana, is operating in bad faith and in a manner that seeks to silence and intimidate former employees into accepting any terms unilaterally thrown at them”.
Twitter laid off about a dozen if African employees just four days after the company opened a physical office in the capital Accra following Musk’s takeover. The laid-off staff have stated that they were not offered severance pay, which they say is required by Ghana’s labour laws, based on their employment contracts.
“They also claim they were not informed about the next steps — unlike employees in the United States and Europe — until a day after CNN reported on their plight,” CNN reporter Larry Madowo said during the CNN’s news bulleting in the video below.