US judge says X must face age bias claims in mass layoff class action

A federal judge in San Francisco has ruled that about 150 older workers who were laid off by social media platform X when Elon Musk acquired the company can sue for age discrimination as a class, exposing the company to potential millions in damages of dollars.

U.S. District Judge Susan Illston, in a ruling issued late Tuesday, said the case presented a common question about the impact a 2022 mass layoff at the company had on workers 50 and older.

Plaintiff John Zeman, who worked in X’s communications department when the company was called Twitter, sued in 2023. He said in his lawsuit that X fired 60 percent of its employees who were 50 or older and almost three quarters of those who were over 60 years old. , compared to 54% of employees under 50.

“Plaintiff has shown, beyond mere speculation, that Twitter may have discriminated against older employees in the November 4, 2022 (mass disposition), which constitutes a single decision that affected all members of the proposed class,” Illston wrote.

Tuesday’s ruling allows Zeman’s lawyers to send notice of the lawsuit to potential class members, giving them a chance to opt out of the case.

X did not respond to a request for comment. The company has denied engaging in discrimination and said it eliminated the entire communications department where Zeman worked after Musk took over, regardless of the age of those workers.

Shannon Liss-Riordan, a lawyer for Zeman and about 2,000 other former Twitter employees who filed a series of legal complaints against the company, said she was pleased with the decision.

The lawsuit is one of about a dozen that X has faced as a result of Musk’s decision to lay off more than half of Twitter’s workforce in 2022.

Those cases include various allegations, which X has denied, including that the company fired employees and contractors without the required advance notice, targeted women for layoffs, and forced out disabled workers by banning remote work.

In August, two judges separately dismissed the gender and disability bias cases, allowing the plaintiffs to file amended complaints that flesh out their claims.

Two other lawsuits claim the company owes former employees at least $500 million in severance pay. One of those cases was dismissed in July.

(Reporting by Wiessner in Albany, New York; Editing by Alexia Garamfalvi and Jonathan Oatis)