San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu said Tuesday that he will look into the loss of Twitter janitors’ jobs, which appears to be in violation of San Francisco law.
Members of the SEIU Local 87 went on strike Monday as their contract was set to expire Dec. 9. The contractor that employed them is set to be replaced by another contractor that Twitter would not disclose to the union, according to Olga Miranda, president of the union local. Twitter then moved up the janitors’ last day on the job to Monday, she said.
According to San Francisco law, when a company changes contractors for security or janitorial services, the contractor is supposed to rehire workers for at least 90 days after the transition.
When contacted by MarketWatch on Tuesday, Chiu said: “Elon Musk has a long history of flouting labor laws. While I’m not surprised this happened, I feel for those workers as well as all Twitter employees and contractors who have been laid off. We will be looking into this further.”
Miranda said 48 janitors in total are affected, 30 of whom were waiting to go back to work because many Twitter employees had been working from home and not as many janitors were needed.
San Francisco-based Twitter, whose communications team was reportedly almost entirely laid off at the beginning of November after Musk bought the company, has not returned a request for comment. Musk has cut about half of the company’s pre-acquisition workforce of 7,500 since he took over.
Also Tuesday, Ted Goldberg, a senior editor at KQED, San Francisco’s public radio station, tweeted that the San Francisco Department of Building Inspection is launching an investigation into news reported by Forbes that Twitter has set up bedrooms for employees at its headquarters.
“We need to make sure the building is being used as intended,” a representative of the department told KQED News.
