A year after abruptly laying them off, Twitter—now X—is yet to give its Africa team their severance packages.
The team of 20, headquartered in Ghana, had announced the launch of a new office a week prior to their layoffs. While teams across other continents received—in emails informing them of their layoffs—emails to the Twitter Africa team included no details on severance packages. All requests to the Twitter headquarters were also not responded to.
BBC reported that the team then engaged a team of lawyers from Agrncy Seven Seven who were in contact with the Elon Musk-led company, but Twitter stopped responding to the lawyers in May 2023, right when discussions were almost at a close.
Now, the team is once again considering legal action against Twitter/X for violating Ghanaian labour laws.
Last week, BBC once again reported that the team has yet to get its severance package from Twitter/X. While the ex-Twitter Africa team had reestablished contact, and both parties had agreed that all settlements would conclude by October 5, the BBC reports that Twitter/X once again ignored the deadline, the latest in a string of missed deadlines.
“Every time we get close, they go silent for weeks on end with no explanation. It has been one year since they were all laid off, defeating the entire purpose of a redundancy package, which is meant to cushion employees against the adverse effects of being laid off,” said Carla Olympio from Agency Seven Seven.
The ex-Twitter Africa team is just one of several ex-Twitter employees who are being taunted by billionaire Musk’s indifference. There are reportedly over 2,200 arbitration cases against Twitter/X by ex-employees who, after Musk’s bungled Twitter takeover, were left without severance packages. The company globally owes at least $500 million in severance packages, an amount Musk doesn’t seem to be interested in paying—just as he’s not interested in paying the rent on the Twitter/X headquarters or paying its Google Cloud bills.