Catastrophic Turn for Zuckerberg's Meta Appears to Be on the Horizon: This Could Shatter Records
When rumors of layoffs at Twitter started to appear in mainstream media, the left had a meltdown. One lawyer even sued Musk “preemptively” over the layoffs.
One wonders if they’ll respond the same way to similar news from Meta, which is still run by leftist darling Mark Zuckerberg.
Meta Platforms Inc. may being “large-scale layoffs” potentially affecting thousands of employees as early as this week, according to an exclusive report from The Wall Street Journal.
As a percentage of total workforce, the cuts would be smaller than those Twitter announced last week. But the total number of employees to lose their jobs at Meta was expected to exceed anything previously seen from a major tech company.
At the end of third quarter, Meta employed more than 87,000 people. The exact number of layoffs was not clear, but “many thousands of employees” were facing the prospect of unemployment just before the holidays.
The could start Wednesday, sourced told The Journal — a little more than six weeks before Christmas.
Big tech companies saw tremendous growth during the pandemic, with millions of workers and school children forced to stay home and looking for entertainment, but that has slowed, and in some cases reversed itself, as lockdowns have ended.
Nonessential travel had already been canceled, beginning this week, according to the sources who spoke with The Journal.
The layoffs would be the first to be implemented by Meta, or Facebook, since Zuckerberg founded the company almost 19 years ago.
The layoffs had been anticipated for some time. Zuckerberg told the company in June that, “Realistically, there are probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn’t be here.”
Big tech companies in general have been looking to cut expenses this year, in part by reducing staffing.
On Friday, Twitter employees were notified by email whether they were out of a job, according to The Washington Post.
“We recognize that this will impact a number of individuals who have made valuable contributions to Twitter, but this action is unfortunately necessary to ensure the company’s success moving forward,” new CEO Elon Musk said late Thursday in an email, according to The Post.
A lawyer who filed a class action lawsuit on behalf of Twitter employees said Friday that Musk was “making an effort to comply” with relevant law, Bloomberg reported.
Labor lawyer Shannon Liss-Riordan filed suit Thursday anyway, claiming Twitter had violated federal and California laws against layoffs on short notice.
She said she was happy to learn that some Twitter employees would continue to be paid until Jan. 4 after she sued the company “pre-emptively” against layoffs.
Friday, Musk locked employees out of the Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters and corporate email and Slack accounts in conjunction with his announcement to cut Twitter’s 3,700-strong workforce in half.
Riss-Riordan’s lawsuit sought an order for Twitter to comply with the federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act, which requires companies with 100 or more employees to give at least 60 days notice of wide-spread layoffs.
Riss-Riordan also claimed to be concerned with how Twitter determined which workers to boot and for alleged retaliation against a plaintiff in the class action suit, Bloomberg said.
Her suit also sought to protect employees from signing away their right to take part in lawsuits; Twitter has told workers severance agreements to come next week will be accompanied by waivers against making claims against the company.
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