Some on the Twitter cleaning force had worked at the company for more than 10 years. But none of that mattered to its new owner, Elon Musk, when he kicked them to the curb just weeks before the holidays.
"It's a sad and frustrating thing for our families and children," Adrianna Villarreal told the BBC in Spanish. She said she’s worked for the company for the last four years, and now she’s terrified she won’t have the money to feed her family.
Julio Alvarado, a 10-year employee at Twitter, told the BBC, “I can only tell you, I don’t have money to pay the rent. I'm not going to have medical insurance. I don't know what I'm going to do."
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The cleaning staff were members of a cleaning union, and when they learned their jobs were at risk, they organized a strike on Monday to protest. Within days, the cleaners were fired.
Olga Miranda, president of the union, says she believes they were fired because they were in a union.
According to the BBC, rumors around the company have swirled that the human cleaners would be replaced with robots.
Sen. Scott Wiener of California told the BBC that the workers were treated “horribly.”
"In the short term, I'd like to see him [Musk] treat his janitors like human beings… and get them back working — not just throw them out right before Christmas."
According to The Economic Times, Musk is facing yet another lawsuit from two women who were fired when he initially took over the company. The suit alleges that more than half of employees laid off were women.
Forbes magazine reports that Twitter laid off 57% of the women who worked at the company and only 47% of the men, according to the filing in a San Francisco federal court.
“Women in engineering roles were even more likely to have been fired, with 63% of women being let go compared to 48% of men, according to the lawsuit,” Forbes’ Carlie Porterfield writes.
This latest suit is just one among a slew of other legal actions followed by a slew of layoffs across the company.
If Musk wanted attention, something he frankly seems desperate to have at all times, he definitely got it—and he was willing to spend $44 billion for it.
I know he got my attention, as Daily Kos reported, just hours after Musk’s late October takeover, the racist floodgates opened, and the use of the N-word proliferated.
“One analysis [found] the use of a racial slur spiking nearly 500% in the 12 hours after his deal was finalized, which is pretty shocking,” John Oliver said during his show, Last Week Tonight, in mid-November. “Even for a website where a regular trending topic is sometimes just ‘The Jews.’ That happens constantly. You’ll log in and see 30,000 people tweeting about ‘The Jews’ on a Tuesday afternoon, and you do not want to click to find out why.”
