Former employees of Twitter Africa’s office in Accra are yet to receive their severance packages.
According to the former staff of the social media company, management have refused to pay their bill for entitlements since they were laid off this year.
In a report by CNN, though the former employees agreed to a 3-month severance package, the company is yet to pay.
“They literally ghosted us,” one former Twitter Africa employee told CNN.
“Although Twitter has eventually settled former staff in other locations, Africa staff have still been left in the lurch despite us eventually agreeing to specific negotiated terms.”
The former employees say they reluctantly agreed to the severance package without benefits, even though it was less than what colleagues elsewhere received.
“Twitter was non-responsive until we agreed to the three months because we were all so stressed and exhausted and tired of the uncertainty, reluctant to take on the extra burdens of a court case so we felt we had no choice but to settle,” another former employee told CNN.
The dozen or so team members were laid off just four days after the social network opened a physical office in Accra last November.
Some of them said they had moved to Ghana from other African nations, and depended on their jobs at Twitter to support their legal status in the country.
Twitter reportedly owes over $500 million in severance packages to over a thousand employees it fired months ago.
Courtney McMillian, who oversaw Twitter’s employee benefits programs as its “head of total rewards” before she was laid off in January, filed the proposed class action in San Francisco federal court.
McMillian claims that under a severance plan created by Twitter in 2019, most workers were promised two months of their base pay plus one week of pay for each full year of service if they were laid off.
Senior employees such as McMillian were owed six months of base pay, according to the lawsuit.
But Twitter only gave laid-off workers at most one month of severance pay, and many of them did not receive anything, McMillian claims.
Twitter laid off more than half of its workforce as a cost-cutting measure after Elon Musk acquired the company in October.
Source: EVANS ANNANG