OTTAWA — Two former Twitter employees in Ontario are suing the social media company, alleging they were mistreated in the mass job cuts that new owner Elon Musk executed upon taking control of the company. 

The two cases were filed separately, but both claim damages for wrongful dismissal, saying the workers were entitled to more notice, or compensation for the lack of it.

Twitter has not yet filed statements of defence in either case, and the company did not answer an inquiry from The Logic about whether it intends to.

According to his lawsuit, 31-year-old Hirokazu Tei was a senior software engineer who joined Twitter in July 2021 and was the technical lead for two teams, overseeing five other people.

His LinkedIn profile says he worked on content-moderation infrastructure in Twitter Communities, the company’s answer to Facebook Groups. He “planned and implemented the reporting, reviewing and remediation pipeline for the new Communities feature, de-risking legal infringement and reducing user exposure to violative content.”

The claim says Tei made a base salary of just over $182,000, plus annual bonuses, benefits and stock incentives that brought the total value of his yearly compensation to “no less than $399,258.01.”

Tei’s claim says trouble for him started almost immediately after Musk took over: Four days after the transaction closed, Tei’s statement alleges, his regular paycheque was short $700.

A Markham resident, Tei worked remotely, the claim says. On Nov. 4, the day the first mass layoffs struck, Tei was cut off from Twitter’s systems. The filing says he then got conflicting information from the company, first telling him that “although his employment had been suspended, he had not been terminated,” and then later that he would be terminated, but not until Jan. 9.

The cuts at Twitter have been notoriously chaotic.

“Despite the defendants’ notice of termination purporting to provide Hirokazu with working notice … the defendants denied Hirokazu access to their systems and Hirokazu could no longer perform his job responsibilities,” the filing says. 

Laid off in the teeth of a downturn, it says, Tei struggled to find new work, and wasn’t helped by Twitter’s refusal to give him a positive reference, or the conflicting information at first about whether he was even out of a job. Twitter’s eventual notice that he would indeed be fired as of Jan. 9 but would stay employed until then was a problem, the suit says, because his “terms of employment with the defendants prevented him from competing against the defendants’ business while he was employed by the defendants.”

Tei’s claim, filed Jan. 13—four days after his termination took effect—says that, given his seniority and the complications of his dismissal, he’s entitled to a year’s worth of compensation from Twitter. The claim’s breach-of-contract component, which includes wrongful dismissal, is worth $400,000, it says, plus unspecified amounts for lost benefits, bonuses and other odds and ends.

“I have only been at Twitter for 1.5 years,” Tei wrote in a public post about his layoff. “I did not build Twitter. From the bottom of my heart, I did want to express how much I appreciate the people who have helped to build this product. What you built has touched the lives of hundreds of millions, including me. I wanted to thank you, and I wanted to mourn with you that something that was so good, could fall apart.”

In an email, Tei’s lawyer declined to talk about the case.

The claim in the other lawsuit, which was filed earlier this week, is less detailed. Zuhair Sirel of Mississauga said he started working for Twitter just last April, as a client account manager, and was simply terminated Nov. 14.

Sirel’s LinkedIn profile says he worked on Twitter’s behalf with Canadian auto-sector and packaged-goods companies “to develop creative advertising and measurement programs.” In his own farewell-to-Twitter posting, he wrote that he worked with “the most talented and caring team that I have ever been a part of.”

His claim says his dismissal without cause entitled him to a payment equal to six months of his pay and other compensation, totalling at least $98,777.

Twitter is also being sued by ex-employees in the United States, and by landlords in San Francisco and London.