Ex-employees sue Twitter again over refusal to pay arbitration fees

San Francisco, July 6 (IANS) Former Twitter employees have sued the company again, this time for allegedly refusing to pay the expected cost of legal arbitration. 

The class-action lawsuit, filed in the Northern District of California, claims that "Twitter has refused to engage in arbitration -- despite having compelled employees to arbitrate their claims".

Since Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter in October 2022, the company has been accused of a variety of unlawful acts, including failing to pay laid off employees promised severance payments, discriminating against employees on the basis of sex, race, age, and disability, failing to pay promised bonuses, violating the WARN Act and FMLA, and other violations. 

"Approximately 2,000 of Twitter's former employees have attempted to pursue arbitration claims against the company, following Twitter's successfully moving to compel arbitration in several federal class action cases in court against it," according to the new lawsuit.

According to the complaint, the arbitration agreements require ex-employees to pay a nominal filing fee to launch claims with the Judicial Arbitration and Mediation Services (JAMS), but after that, Twitter has to pay "all other arbitration fees".

This latest lawsuit is part of a slew of litigation between Twitter and several thousands of employees who lost jobs when Musk took over last year.

The micro-blogging platform had a legal victory earlier this year that forced thousands of laid-off employees into arbitration. 

Twitter is also facing a lawsuit after being accused of failing to pay for services for offices located in London, Dublin, Sydney and Singapore.

A Sydney-based infrastructure company Facilitate is seeking more than $1 million Australian dollars in payments across the three businesses for alleged owed payments that date back to October of last year, when Musk acquired Twitter, according to reports.

Reports also surfaced that the micro-blogging platform refused to pay Google Cloud bills as its contract came up for renewal in June.

However, Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino reportedly settled the strained ties with Google Cloud over non-payments of its bills before the June 30 contract deadline.