Twitter laid off workers in Africa last year. They say they’ve been ignored

Sources told CNBC that the former Twitter employees in Ghana, who were laid off in November, were left without severance pay and had not heard from the company for three months.

As part of new owner Elon Musk’s efforts to cut costs, Twitter has laid off nearly all of the employees in its only office in Africa.

After announcing the wave of global job cuts, Musk tweeted in November that “unfortunately there is no choice when a company is losing over $4 million a day.”

He added, “Everyone who got out of office was offered 3-month termination of service, which is 50% more than legally required,” though it was not clear to which office or judicial authority he was referring.

Under Ghanaian labor law, employees must and must be paid redundancy They were given three months’ notice before they were made redundant. The sources said the Twitter workers in the capital, Accra, were paid less than a month.

A former employee, who wished to remain anonymous due to the sensitive nature of the situation, told CNBC Monday that the workers asked for compensation in lieu of notice and emotional damages as part of the negotiated settlement with Twitter, but that both were denied.

“Twitter has been dealing with us in bad faith since we were laid off in November 2022. There was no attempt to even negotiate with us until international news started reporting on it, and after we contacted the Ghana Labor Bureau,” said another source, who also spoke to CNBC on condition of anonymity. For his identity because of the sensitive nature of the situation.

“It was an arduous process and they refused some of our requests, which we thought was fair given the circumstances and how we were treated.”

Through their legal representative, the employees eventually reached out to accept what they viewed as a watered-down severance offer in May, but have endured radio silence from Twitter since then.

“We played ball and accepted their offer just so we could move on with our lives. However, they have completely ignored us since our lawyer reached out to theirs to accept the offer in May. For many of us, it was an expense they owed,” the second source added.

Twitter responded to CNBC’s request for comment with an automated response.

As the first source told CNBC, “Everyone is tired and frustrated.”

“This settlement is not even what we were promised but we decided to just accept it and it was a struggle,” they said.

“Some still haven’t got jobs yet, they have families to feed and the dismissal process will go a long way, so to have it postponed in this (in this way) is very sad.”

Musk said over the weekend that since Musk’s acquisition of the $44 billion social media platform in October, Twitter has lost nearly half of its ad revenue and is still generating negative cash flow, along with taking on a large pile of debt.

The company also faces competition from the new Meta Platform, which logged more than 100 million users in its first week of operation.

Scott Galloway, Professor of Marketing at New York University’s Stern School of Business, Written on Friday that Twitter last week “has become MySpace: an innovation-free social network slowly dying by Meta.”

“The decline in revenue is related to the reduction in the workforce, but not because of it,” Galloway added.