Two ex-employees of Tesla are suing the electrical vehicle maker for not providing the 60 days advance notice required by federal law during its recent round of layoffs.
John Lynch and Daxon Hartsfield who filed the lawsuit in the U.S District Court for the Western District of Texas were let go in mid-June along with 500 others.
This lawsuit follows a recent slew of suits brought against Tesla by former employees. On June 2, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said that a coming economic downturn would force the company to lay off 10% of its salaried workforce.
However more recently this figure has been revised to 3%.
The lawsuit is a class action suit and was filed on the 19th of June. The suit states that 500 workers have been terminated from Tesla’s gigafactory in Sparks, Nevada.
They allege that the company failed to adhere to federal laws on mass layoffs under the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act.
The two employees are therefore seeking class action status for Tesla employees who were laid off in the United States in May or June without the 60-day notice required by the Act as well as pay and benefits for the 60-day notification period.
The complaint also states that Tesla’s failure to provide advance written notice has had a devastating economic impact on the terminated workers. According to the suit the company offered some employees one week of severance pay.
The filing also stated, “Instead, Tesla has simply notified the employees that their terminations would be effective immediately. Tesla has also failed to provide a statement of the basis for reducing the notification period to zero day advance notice.”
Tesla and its subsidiary companies employed just under 100,000 workers in 2021, according to its annual report. This includes all the people employed at its factories and facilities in Austin and Sparks, Nevada, as well as in Buffalo, New York and Fremont, California, Berlin and Shanghai.
Tesla has not made any comment on the lawsuit to date.