When Elon Musk first took over Twitter, he immediately fired pretty much everyone who worked there, without just cause. This was legal for him to do because, unlike every other country in the world, we have a thing called at-will employment. This means that your boss can fire you for any reason or no reason. Musk understood this and used it to his advantage. Well, we assume he did, anyway.
This weekend, however, he at least pretended to have no understanding of this or labor laws in general, announcing that the social media site would fund the legal bills of anyone whose actions on the site led to problems at their workplace.
“If you were unfairly treated by your employer due to posting or liking something on this platform, we will fund your legal bill,” he wrote. “No limit. Please let us know.”
Naturally, the responses to the tweet were largely paid blue checkmarks with the most heart-wrenching stories about how they were fired from their jobs just for being gross bigots online, each claiming that theirs was the perfect test case for this project.
“This is beyond awesome,” wrote one Muskovite. “Nobody asked him to do it. Nobody expected him to do it. Could cost him and the company unimaginable amounts of money. But if it works . . . If corporations and institutions hear about this and are scared straight, we all win.”
Yeah, no, that’s not going to happen. There is a reason why, despite the right-wing hysteria over people being fired for their bigoted tweets, we haven’t actually heard about any lawsuits against employers for having done this.
First of all, as mentioned — with the lone exception of Montana — we have at-will employment in this country. This means that your employer can fire you for any reason or no reason at all. You can be fired because a new manager “wants their own team,” because your boss didn’t like your tie or simply because they were having a bad day and wanted to take it out on someone.
We are the only nation that does things this way. In literally every other country on earth, an employer generally has to have “just cause” in order to fire someone.
So yes, generally speaking, people can be fired for their tweets or for having a bad hair day.
The only exception to this rule is that employers aren’t supposed to be able to fire employees for discriminatory reasons or as retaliation for trying to start a union or complaining about discrimination or harassment, though there are exceptions to that, as well. Federally and in many states, businesses with fewer than 15 employees are exempt from Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and the Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA). It’s also pretty easy for businesses to fire people for discriminatory reasons but claim it is for “no reason,” and the onus is on the terminated employee to file an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) complaint, hire a lawyer and prove that they were discriminated against, which is neither cheap nor easy.
This means that the only people who would actually be able to sue over being fired for their tweets are people fired over tweets supporting a union at their place of work or complaining about discrimination or tweeting about something related to their membership in a protected category (e.g. tweeting about being gay, disabled, a member of a particular religion, etc.).
It also means that those fired for bigoted tweets, or “for liking Libs Of TikTok” as one person mentioned, are in fact being fired for “just cause.” Why? Because they are opening the company up to a workplace discrimination or harassment lawsuit.
Now, it’s very difficult to pursue a discrimination or harassment claim against a company. Statistics show that 63 percent of those who file an EEOC complaint against their employer end up losing their jobs (67 percent for those whose complaint is related to a disability) and only a very small percentage end up getting anything out of it. Only seven percent of complaints lead to any change in the workplace and only 12 percent result in any monetary compensation, with the median payout being about $8,500.
This is just one reason why an EEOC report found that only about 30 percent of those who experience workplace discrimination or harassment report it internally and only 15 percent pursue formal legal charges.
However, if someone feels they have been discriminated at work for being gay by a manager whose Twitter feed is full of homophobic drivel, they’ve got a pretty solid case against the company.
This is not even the only way one’s social media presence can be a liability for their employer. A business could face all kinds of lawsuits, boycotts, bad publicity, etc. as the result of an employee’s Twitter feed. Many of those asking for Musk’s help were medical professionals tossed out over spreading misinformation about COVID or vaccines, which was both legal and an entirely reasonable thing to do. People, after all, need to be able to have some trust that when they go to the hospital, they are not in the care of crackpots.
All of this being said, there is some rather delicious irony in the fact that those getting all excited about Elon’s offer are Republicans, whose votes support things like at-will employment and other weak labor laws. They are the very reason their own bosses do not need a good reason to fire them. Perhaps they’d know this if they spent less time trying to “own the libs” and more time learning about what their party actually stands for beyond just hurting the people they want to see hurt.
Someone on social media proposed ending billionaires. Once your wealth reached $999M, everything above that is confiscated, you get a trophy saying "I won capitalism," and you get a dog park named after you.
I'd lower it to $10M, but that's me.
didn't Musk fire some employees because he didn't like what they tweeted?