

Class action filed against SpaceX over mass layoffs - salemh
http://washingtonexaminer.com/class-action-filed-against-spacex-over-mass-layoffs/article/feed/2155399

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marktangotango
>>The lawsuit alleges that SpaceX ordered mass layoffs of approximately 400
employees on July 21, without giving them advance notice.

Employment law not withstanding, I didn't know they'd had a layoff. Anyone
else have any info?

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hga
See the major discussion here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8154866](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8154866)

In short, they claim they were just laying off their "bottom" 5% a week after
doing reviews, and are in the process of hiring an additional 20% new
employees.

Whether this constitutes a layoff is at the moment unclear; it's been noted
that at least one other company (in)famous for this practice treated these
actions as layoffs, and of course if they were "fired for cause" as SpaceX
seems to be claiming they aren't due unemployment, which of course would
increase what SpaceX has to pay for that.

The nastier claim is that SpaceX didn't pay all the back wages/salaries they
were due, which is rather white line and something the government cares rather
a lot about, if for no other reason than it deprives them of taxes.

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Someone
I don't think deprivement of taxes has anything to do with it. "A deal is a
deal" is one of the things that society depends on heavily and that we have
government for to enforce. If companies can get away with that, what stops me
from agreeing with a builder that he builds a house for me for $100k, and,
when he is almost done, saying "I changed my mind, I'll pay you only $75k" or
anything similar to that?

~~~
hga
I judge this in part based on some experience in Virginia, where I was working
for a startup that just before/as I joined got a couple of "devil" investors
who we eventually realized preferred to own all of nothing instead of
something of something. Sufficiently bad we retained a law firm and one day
most of the company sent in our resignation from its office, 13 people from
CEO and President to all the senior engineers.

These "devils" then refused to pay our salaries for the pay period up to that
date, and I learned, working with the (former) company lawyer, that doing this
was not just a misdemeanor, but there was a state agency staffed with
humorless people (they've heard everything) tasked with extracting back pay
from employers.

In most other domains there's no criminal law involved nor any special units
of government tasked with this. Note also that Virginia is considered by many
not to be "worker friendly".

Your example is an interesting one. Perhaps because stiffing builders and
people who repair stuff is so easy, and most certainly because this involves
real estate or other tangible personal property (e.g. a car), there's legal,
but still civil law mechanisms in most/all states to make them whole, they can
get what's generally called a Mechanic's Lien:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanic's_lien](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanic's_lien)

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DiabloD3
Given how smart Elon Musk is about issues like this, this is rather hard to
believe.

