Ex-Twitter Engineer Accuses Twitter of Retaliation for Helping Doomed Coworkers

One of the practically 4,000 Twitter workers laid off within the firm‘s tumultuous post-Elon Musk acquisition says the company illegally targeted him for trying to help fellow employees save documents prior to their abrupt removal from the company.

Former Twitter engineer Emmanuel “Manu” Cornet reportedly filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board on Monday accusing them of retaliatory actions days after Musk took the helm as CEO. That firing, according to the complaint, came in response to a Google Chrome extension Cornet built and shared with employees that let them download emails from their Gmail accounts. Twitter haphazardly moved to lay off around half of its global workforce last week and has already reportedly had to beg some of those workers to return.

Cornet detailed some of the time leading up to his firing on his personal blog. With rumors of mass layoffs circling Twitter’s on-line channels, Cornet says he determined to add his electronic mail downloading instrument to the Google Play Store after which despatched a duplicate of that hyperlink to a Twitter Slack channel. Workers, now in hindsight rightfully frightened of sudden layoff calls from their new boss, may use the instrument to obtain necessary paperwork like efficiency critiques, inventory statements, key proofs of feat and different human assets paperwork.

“Think about it: if you thought you may lose access to all your work email tomorrow, is there anything in there that you may need?” Cornet stated.

Twitter allegedly noticed issues in a different way. Cornet, within the criticism and on his weblog alleges Twitter fired him the identical day he shared the extension hyperlink on Slack. The submit containing the hyperlink was additionally allegedly taken down. Cornet printed a redacted model of his termination electronic mail which stated his, “recent behavior has violated multiple policies.”

Twitter didn’t instantly reply to Gizmodo’s request for remark.

Cornet has had a busy few days away from Twitter. Last week, he was the lead plaintiff in a class action lawsuit accusing Twitter of doubtless violating federal and state legal guidelines requiring firms usually to offer not less than 60 days of advance discover for main layoffs.

“A couple of people much smarter than me have suggested that that this may be an excuse to fire me over a ‘troublemaker’ vibe coming from me,” Cornet stated on his weblog. “I don’t deny that, and I don’t blame the new management for preferring not to have to deal with that liability.”

The new criticism comes on the heels of one other unfair labor complaint submitting, this time by the Alphabet Workers Union, which accused Google of illegally stopping contract employees from accessing an internet “Share my Salary” spreadsheet exhibiting employees pay charges. The AWU says tons of of employees had submitted pay particulars to that spreadsheet because it was created in 2021 in an effort to bolster office transparency. According to the AWU, Alphabet withdrew entry to that spreadsheet on July 14, leaving as many as 50,000 employees locked out of the file.

“It’s clear that Alphabet and its various affiliates do not want workers to be armed with knowledge regarding pay rates across the company,” Alphabet Workers Union Organizing Chair Shelby Hunter stated in an announcement. “Every Alphabet worker, including Temporary, Vendor and Contract workers, have a right to pay transparency and fair wages.”