June 22, 2022
Former Tesla employees John Lynch and Daxton Hartsfield have filed a lawsuit against Tesla alleging that more than 500 employees at the Nevada plant were fired and that the company failed to comply with federal laws on mass layoffs, which require a 60-day notification period.
In online postings and interviews, more than 20 people identified themselves as Tesla employees and said they had been fired.The aggrieved workers are demanding that salaries and benefits for all former Tesla employees in the United States be paid for a period of 60 days after the termination was announced.
In response, Elon Musk called the lawsuit “trivial.”
“Let’s not read too much into a pre-emptive lawsuit that has no standing. It seems like anything related to Tesla gets a lot of clicks, whether it is trivial or significant. I would put that lawsuit you’re referring to in the trivial category,” Musk said at the Qatar Economic Forum organized by Bloomberg.
Musk’s statement on the issue was criticized by Shannon Liss-Riordan, a lawyer representing the workers, who said she found it deeply troubling that the world’s richest man considered it “trivial” that his company was flagrantly violating federal labor laws.
The sources for this piece include an article in Reuters.
