
As part of owner Elon Musk's cost-saving initiative, Twitter let go of the majority of their workforce at their only African office. In November, Musk posted on Twitter that there was no other option as the firm was losing more than $4 million on a daily basis. This came following his $44 billion purchase of the social media website in October and coinciding with the vast decrease of their advertising income, which is now almost halved.
Former Twitter employees in Ghana, who were laid off in November, have not received any severance pay and have not heard from the company in three months, sources told CNBC. As part of new owner Elon Musk's cost-cutting, Twitter let go of nearly all personnel at its only African office. After the announcement of the job cuts, Musk tweeted that "unfortunately there is no choice when the company is losing over $4M/day," and added that "everyone exited was offered 3 months of severance, although it is unclear to which office and jurisdiction he was referring." According to Ghanaian employment law, staff must be paid redundancy and should obtain three months' notice before being made redundant. However, workers in Accra were only given a month's notice, as reported by the sources. One former employee - who wished to remain anonymous due to the sensitivity of the situation - revealed to CNBC that during negotiations, several compensation requests were rejected before they settled for an offer in the hope of invoking finality. "Twitter has not dealt with us fairly since we were laid off in November 2022. There was no effort to negotiate a severance until international news started to report on this, and after we had reached out to the Labour Office in Ghana," mentioned another source, who also spoke to CNBC while wishing to remain anonymous due to the confidentiality of the affair.
The process has been tiresome and some of the requests that we made, which we believed to be reasonable given the circumstances and how we were treated, were denied. Nevertheless, the employees' legal representative contacted Twitter in May with an agreement to accept a lessened severance package. Despite that, there has been no answer from Twitter since then. We agreed to their settlement terms, hoping to move on with our lives. However, not only have they not replied, but also, numerous expenses remain unpaid. The automated response is the only reaction from Twitter that was received by CNBC. Our source relayed their exhaustion and disappointment with the situation. "Accepting the settlement they provided was the only option, yet this has been a real challenge. Some of us are still unemployed, with families to support, so this severance would have made a substantial difference in our lives. To have it delayed this way is simply heartbreaking."
Since Musk's purchase of the social media platform in October, revenue from advertising has nearly halved and the company continues to generate negative cash flow while shouldering a large debt load. They are furthermore facing competition from the new Meta platform Threads, which achieved 100 million users in its first week. Scott Galloway, professor of marketing at New York University Stern Business School, wrote on Friday that Twitter last week had become "MySpace: a social network void of innovation being slowly euthanized by Meta" and that the decline in revenue can be attributed to its reduction in workforce, rather than the other way around.
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