Twitter employees forced to drop class-action suit over severance

Twitter Inc. won a ruling forcing laid-off workers fighting the company over their severance packages to pursue their claims in individual arbitration rather than through a class-action lawsuit.

Hundreds of workers who were laid off by Elon Musk after he bought the social media company in October have already filed arbitration claims.

A San Francisco federal judge ruled Friday that the workers are obligated under their contracts to go through arbitration, in which private judges resolve disputes in closed-door hearings.

An attorney who said she’s filed at least 300 such claims said the process could be costly for Twitter.

“Insisting that workers file claims one by one has backfired for many companies our firm has taken on,” lawyer Shannon Liss-Riordan said in a statement this week. “These companies think they can make employees just go away and not assert their rights by using arbitration clauses, but we have made them sorry about what they wished for.”