To be clear, in the EU, the workers have been blocked from access, but they have not been fired, because he legally cannot fire them in that manner.
Before access was blocked, from what I've heard, many of the EU Twitter employees read the "you're fired" email, said "hah, not from that I'm not" and went right back into work the next day.
If Twitter employees were unionized here in the US, it would be a similar story: Musk could say "you're all fired", but unless he went through the processes outlined in the union contract to fire the people, they would not be fired. At most, if he could get the payroll employees to do his bidding, he could stop them from getting paid, but that would absolutely not hold up in court, and he would have to pay them with back pay once the legal system got done with it—and that kind of legal dispute probably wouldn't take 2 years, since it would be an extremely straightforward case of breach of contract.
In this case, what would strike achieve from people who Musk wants to not work anyway? Twitter literally closed EU facilities. I don't know any union law in any country that prevents company from closing facilities and eliminating all jobs.
Twitter workers could strike and shut down the site, they could strike and not make changes like the $8 verification badge, they could strike until Musk agreed to reasonable work hours.
They could afford to pay a lawyer a whole lot to fight layoffs and firings.
Not a perfect set of options, but better options than they have today.
Not legally they haven't been. Facebook discovered this recently, when they attempted to lay off people in NL. They discovered that because it's a mass layoff, they need to consult a workers council. But they don't have a workers council, so they need to elect one, which will take three months. Then another three months of consultation.
Even in Ireland/UK which have pretty employer friendly labour laws, none of the FB employees have actually been laid off yet, they're still in a consultation period (till December I believe).
Unfortunately for US CEO's, the US labour law does not apply globally.
Musk wants 20-25% of the workforce remaining to run Twitter. He’s not closing all facilities since he is promoting RTO.
In theory that’s a bargaining chip that organized labor could have used (this would involve labor solidarity between the laid-off/fired workers and the ones he wanted to keep). Bringing in “scabs” with zero institutional knowledge to run the site effectively without torching his $30 billion equity investment could have been very difficult, especially since RTO in San Francisco is apparently valuable to him.
> Musk wants 20-25% of the workforce remaining to run Twitter.
Engineering is cut down to about ~10% or less in many areas. A friend of mine told me their group is down to ~10 from 155 after 2/3 being laid off and about 90% of the remainder rejecting the "hardcore" ultimatum.
I'm expecting a lot of the non-SF facilities to close and those people to be fired as well. They should have considered geography more in the layoff, but because he had a bunch of Tesla goons deciding who to cut instead of people who know the business or HR professionals who know how to plan workforce reduction it doesn't seem like geographic distribution was considered. But it's certainly not economical to operate many office locations designed for hundreds with only a small fraction of that number still employed.
Before access was blocked, from what I've heard, many of the EU Twitter employees read the "you're fired" email, said "hah, not from that I'm not" and went right back into work the next day.
If Twitter employees were unionized here in the US, it would be a similar story: Musk could say "you're all fired", but unless he went through the processes outlined in the union contract to fire the people, they would not be fired. At most, if he could get the payroll employees to do his bidding, he could stop them from getting paid, but that would absolutely not hold up in court, and he would have to pay them with back pay once the legal system got done with it—and that kind of legal dispute probably wouldn't take 2 years, since it would be an extremely straightforward case of breach of contract.