Walter Finch
Tech titan Elon Musk is facing challenges in his efforts to fire 26 employees of Twitter Spain after he bought the social media company two weeks ago.
As part of his plans to fire 37,000 workers and slash the wage bill by half, it is reported that he fired most of Twitter’s Spanish workforce by sending an email at 17.30 last Friday – a classic time for sending bad news.
But the Spanish unions UGT and CCOO weighed in by declaring that such sackings were against Spanish labour law and therefore not valid.
“We hear that TwitterSpainSL dismisses its 26 workers by mail,” Pepe Álvarez, the general secretary of UGT wrote on Twitter.
“In our country it must be done as a collective dismissal, it requires opening a consultation period, negotiating 15 days and communicating it to the labour authority.
“Failure to do so makes the layoffs null and void.”
Álvarez went on to insist that Twitter is obligated to reinstate the workers, and demanded labour reforms to guard against collective dismissals.
“People cannot be so unprotected. A social and legal state cannot allow a man, no matter how rich he may be, to leave people without work by trampling on their rights,” he added.
