TIME, the news magazine, has published a draft of an open letter recently circulating among some of Twitter’s 7,500 employees that criticizes talk from Elon Musk of decreasing the social media platform’s workforce by 75 percent.
Among other issues, the letter raises concerns of potential discrimination on the basis of employees’ political beliefs. Musk has prominently aligned himself with generally right-wing causes, and he has criticized what he has characterized as a liberal slant among Twitter’s staff. Musk has also already faced other challenges over working conditions at his companies, including Tesla, where he is the CEO. A California state agency dealing with civil rights concerns sued Tesla over its treatment of Black workers. Authorities “said Tesla’s flagship Fremont, California, plant was a racially segregated workplace where Black employees were harassed and discriminated against in terms of job assignments, discipline and pay,” as Reuters summarized.
Musk has also faced personal claims of sexual misconduct, including in a case involving someone reported to be a former flight attendant for corporate trips at SpaceX, who was provided a $250,000 settlement payment and signed an agreement limiting her legal ability to publicly comment on the situation.
As for Twitter, the open letter — signatories of which weren’t publicly identified in initial reporting — also expressed worries about the prospects of workers at Twitter using work visas, whose lives could be suddenly upended if left without their employment. In the months-long process of Musk’s on-again, off-again push to buy Twitter moving forward, the public menace who just won’t go away has repeatedly antagonized Twitter executives. He also accused the company of deception surrounding the number of bots on the site. There is a Friday deadline for Musk to finalize his acquisition of Twitter. Otherwise, litigation in which the company — whose stock price has fluctuated amid Musk’s antics — was seeking to force the deal’s closure will resume.
“We demand leadership to respect the platform and the workers who maintain it by committing to preserving the current headcount,” the letter said. “We demand that leadership does not discriminate against workers on the basis of their race, gender, disability, sexual orientation, or political beliefs. We also demand safety for workers on visas, who will be forced to leave the country they work in if they are laid off.” The document also covered benefits and severance policies. “We demand to be treated with dignity, and to not be treated as mere pawns in a game played by billionaires,” it concluded. A note circulating with the letter inside Twitter said signatures “will not be made public unless we have critical mass,” according to Time. Meanwhile, Musk has said he would let Trump back on Twitter, where the former president’s follower count was dramatically above where it currently stands on his alternative platform Truth Social. Read the full letter here.
