San Francisco: The United States National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has accused Elon Musk-owned X (formerly Twitter) violated labour laws while firing an employee who criticised the company’s return-to-work policy.
According to NLRB’s complaint, an X employee Yao Yue, who encouraged others in the company’s Slack group to let it fire them instead of quitting, was illegally fired for breaking an unspecified company policy.
A hearing on the case is scheduled for January 30 in San Francisco.
Yue alleged that the social media platform laid her off “in retaliation for her attempt to organise her co-workers not to resign, so they would have better legal footing”.
In a tweet in November last year, she said, “After 12 amazing years and 3 weeks of chaos, I’m officially fired by Twitter. Never expected I would have stayed this long, and never expected I would be this relieved to be gone”.
Musk, after acquiring the company for $44 billion, had told Twitter employees, “If you can physically make it to an office and you don’t show up, resignation is accepted”.
Several employees had then expressed “concern and outrage” over the directive to return to the office immediately.
“Don’t resign, let him fire you. You gain literally nothing out of resignation,” Yue had tweeted. She also posted in a company Slack channel a message saying, “Don’t be fired. Seriously.”
A few days later, she was fired and told that she violated an unspecified company policy, according to the legal document.
The company or Musk has yet to comment on the NLRB complaint.
With inputs from IANS