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.
