Originally published at: Two months later, laid-off Twitter staffers haven't received promised severance pay | Boing Boing
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The progression is always the same with a distressed and failing company regarding its contractual financial obligations*: once ownership takes the precarious step of becoming a deadbeat on the second biggest cost item (real estate, i.e. commercial landlords with lawyers), the first biggest line item (current and former staff) gets shafted next.
Those unfortunate enough to still be on Twitter’s payroll should be aware that they’re likely to end up putting in at least 80 hours of work for no compensation at some point in the near future.
[* for any Musk fanbois still here: no, this is not some brilliant exception.]
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“Everyone exited was offered 3 months of severance, which is 50% more than legally required.”
See, he didn’t actually promise the staff this money; he just offered it. 4D Chess, people! 
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That they lost the entire payroll department and probably haven’t replaced them might have something to do with it 
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If you’re really hardcore- you’ll work 80 hours a week for nothing.
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In goblin mode.
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It is worse than that, the 60 day timer is attached to the visa, not the particular job. So if you had worked at say yahoo for five years, got laid off and took 20 days to land a job at Twitter and say three or seven years later got laid off again you don’t have 60 days to find a new job, you have 40.
H1B is a pretty raw deal: “come to our country, work for people that know they have you under their thumb, pay our taxes, and eventually we will kick you out, k thanks bye!”
(I’m 100% sure the time not resetting when you get a job is to combat a real-but-rare, or imagined-never-happend case of someone getting a new job every 58 days or so and quitting in the first week, or staying just long enough to qualify for unemployment or something. Even so they should have had that 60 days slowly regenerate, say one day per month of employment.)
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No, you’d pay Musk for the privilege.
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I remember my supervisor shared something he probably shouldn’t have. He hired this guy Ali who is originally from Iran. He said that part of the reason he hired him was that he was desperate for a job for this very reason.
Anyway - good guy. Plays the violin and is involved in an Iranian musical group in KC. Glad he’s here!
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How awful–I’ll bet a lot of those people were counting on that money. I hope they get restitution but, as someone who has been the beneficiary of several class action lawsuits for wage theft, unfortunately it will take a long time. I hope all these fines from mismanagement diminishes Musk’s ability to enter into new ventures and/or helps get him ousted from his existing companies.
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Here’s hoping all of this makes the importance of unions obvious to a class of workers who traditionally was more empowered than average. The leopard has come for their faces, and it would be some sweet schadenfreude to have Musk’s behaviour result in a strong push for unions in Silicon valley as a result.
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I hope so, but (as we both know from direct experience) this sort of exploitation has been going on in the industry since the 1990s. The Californian Ideology has always pushed the idea that tech workers are a special class of superior rugged individualists who don’t need unions. Maybe a disaster of this magnitude will finally wake them up.
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He’s just carrying on a Festivus tradition, derived from “the airing of grievances”-- contentiousness.
Hence the holiday greeting: May you have a Contentious Festivus.
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They should crowdfund their lawsuits. There are more people who want to destroy Twitter than Musk has cash to burn.
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Elon: I’m switching our payroll system to Phoenix !
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$8/month will get you a Verified Worker badge (you will need to purchase your verified Verified Worker badge from the God-Emperor’s office).
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I would have thought goblin mode would have been the opposite of that equation since the definition is: “type of behavior which is unapologetically self-indulgent, lazy, slovenly, or greedy, typically in a way that rejects social norms or expectations.” Perhaps it’s that “rejects social norms or expectations” portion that Dr. Patel is referring to?
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That tweet was my first encounter with goblin mode, so I assumed that it meant being “extremely hardcore”, as Musk would say. Perhaps here it means coders willing to wear the same smelly clothes for a week because they’ve been too busy to go home.
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That’s what I was thinking with the “rejects social norms or expectations” part of the definition. ^___^
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