Twitter started this year with a legal victory that forced thousands of laid-off employees into arbitration. These employees had been suing over grievances like unpaid severance and discrimination, and the win spared Twitter from facing a class-action lawsuit. Now, hundreds of ex-employees have sued again, this time alleging in a class-action claim that “Twitter has refused to engage in arbitration—despite having compelled employees to arbitrate their claims.”
According to the complaint, filed Monday in a San Francisco federal court, Twitter won’t come to the table simply because the company doesn’t want to pay for arbitration. Its arbitration agreements require ex-employees to pay a nominal filing fee to launch claims with the Judicial Arbitration and Mediation Services (JAMS), but after that, Twitter has to pay “all other arbitration fees.”
Faced with paying perhaps millions in fees for approximately 2,000 laid-off employees, Twitter allegedly sent a letter to JAMS in early June, requesting that the fees instead be split between parties.
However, granting that request would be a breach of JAMS’s rules. Thus, JAMS responded by telling Twitter that it would not proceed with any arbitration that did not meet JAMS’s standards, the complaint said. After that, Twitter allegedly told JAMS that it “would refuse to proceed with arbitrations in most states outside California,” attaching “a list of 891 arbitrations in which it was refusing to proceed.”
Twitter’s move to avoid paying arbitration fees put hundreds of ex-employees in a seemingly no-win situation, their complaint suggested. They had to choose between waiving Twitter’s obligation to pay their arbitration fees or else risk JAMS declining to arbitrate their cases entirely.
Some of them decided instead to pursue a third option, asking a court to compel Twitter to engage in arbitration with “all former Twitter employees throughout the United States who have filed demands for arbitration against Twitter with JAMS.”
Twitter did not immediately respond to Ars’ request to comment.
A lawyer representing ex-employees, Shannon Liss-Riordan, told Bloomberg that Twitter seemingly didn’t realize how high the cost of forcing arbitration with so many employees would be.
She suggested that now that Twitter “has made its bed, it doesn’t want to lie in it.”
According to JAMS’s website, arbitration fees vary, mostly because of professional fees. Those are based on hourly rates set by individual arbitrators, so it’s difficult to accurately measure. However, no matter what, the cost would easily add up. Twitter would have to pay $2,000 per counterclaim, plus be on the hook for professional fees covering all “hearings, pre- and post-hearing reading and research, and award preparation,” as well as a case management fee that’s 13 percent of professional fees. On the low end, Twitter could end up paying hundreds of thousands—if not millions—of dollars if compelled into arbitration with thousands of employees who have already filed arbitration demands.
It’s unclear whether Twitter could successfully duck these fees or if cash-strapped Twitter could simply be putting off paying another bill. The JAMS website notes that the purpose of suspending arbitration is not to give companies an out but to alert former employees so that they “may seek appropriate redress in a court of competent jurisdiction.”
Liss-Riordan told Bloomberg that she has continued filing arbitration demands for ex-employees, as well as fielding claims from current employees who recently outed Twitter for never paying promised annual bonuses.
Rare settlement for Twitter ex-employee
While it seems like most employees terminated during Twitter’s mass layoffs are struggling to hold Twitter accountable to employee agreements, at least one ex-employee recently secured a win against the penny-pinching social media company.
Twitter has settled with software engineer Alexis Camacho, Bloomberg reported. This settlement comes after the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) decided Camacho was “illegally punished” for their efforts rallying coworkers to protest Twitter owner Elon Musk’s return-to-office mandate.
An NLRB spokesperson, Kayla Blado, told Bloomberg that if Twitter didn’t settle, the NLRB would have issued a complaint. Federal law protects workers’ rights to discuss workplace conditions and take collective action.
The terms of Twitter’s settlement with Camacho have not been disclosed. However, Liss-Riordan represented Camacho, too, and she told Bloomberg she was “very pleased” with the “fair resolution” reached in this case.
Liss-Riordan plans to continue pressing Twitter to reach similarly fair resolutions with thousands of other aggrieved laid-off employees. But those battles seem likely to be more drawn out.
“We look forward to vindicating the rights of our remaining clients through litigation, arbitration, and wherever else we can,” Liss-Riordan told Bloomberg.
Ars could not immediately reach Liss-Riordan for comment. [Update: Liss-Riordan told Ars that “Twitter has realized it is facing thousands of arbitration demands and it is going to be extraordinarily expensive to arbitrate the employees’ claims individually,” so now “it is declining to proceed with arbitration (except in a few states, such as California).” While “Twitter acknowledges it has to pay all the fees for arbitration in California and some other states,” it’s claiming “that’s not the case in other states”—an argument which JAMS has already rejected, Liss-Riordan said.)
Source: Ars Technica
