Twitter agrees to renegotiate severance pay with sacked African staff

Twitter has finally agreed to sit down and renegotiate the severance terms with its sacked staff in the African office.

As the story goes, the Twitter employees were laid off in the recent purge by Elon Musk when he bought and took over the social media company. The company let go of 50% of its workforce.

Unfortunately for the African staff based in Ghana, they had only been in operation for about twelve months and even launched the office recently. In fact they only spent three days physically in the office before they received that dreaded email and were locked out of the company’s servers.

As unfortunate as that was, the employees realised that there was no negotiation with them on their severance pay. Elon Musk had tweeted that “everyone exited was offered 3 months of severance, which is 50% more than legally required.”

The African staff said that the team was not offered 3 months but told via email in early November that they would be paid until their last day of employment — December 4 and they will continue to receive full pay and benefits during the 30-day notice period.

The laid-off employees then hired a lawyer and sent a letter to tTwitter demanding that it complies with Ghana’s labour laws and provides them with additional severance pay and other relevant benefits. They accused Twitter of “deliberately and recklessly flouting the laws of Ghana” and trying to “silence and intimidate” them after firing them.

The affected employees also petitioned the Ghanaian government to compel Twitter to “adhere to the laws of Ghana on redundancy and offer the employees a fair and just negotiation and redundancy pay.”

Not much was heard from Twitter until CNN’s Larry Madowo carried a story on this development.

It seemed that this did the trick as Twitter has now agreed to renegotiate the terms of severance. Larry reported recently that the sacked employees’ lawyer confirmed that Twitter has finally agreed to negotiate with the laid-off Africa team.

We hope both parties would be able to reach an amicable solution as soon as possible.