- A software engineer laid off by Twitter said in an NLRB filing that he was illegally targeted.
- Emmanuel Cornet claimed he was laid off for trying to help Twitter staff preserve work documents.
A former Twitter worker claims that he was illegally laid off because he had tried to help staff preserve work documents.
Emmanuel "Manu" Cornet, who had worked as a Twitter software engineer in San Francisco, filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board on Monday.
The complaint, which has been seen by Insider, says that Twitter had violated clauses of the National Labor Relations Act by terminating Cornet in "retaliation for concerted protected activity."
After Elon Musk took ownership of Twitter on October 27, he fired some of the company's top executives, including its CEO and CFO, and started devising plans for widespread layoffs with help from a team of close advisors. Twitter has since laid off swathes of workers.
"With the layoff rumors, Mr. Cornet became concerned that he and other Twitter employees would lose access to important documents should they be laid off, such as statements reflecting their stock in Twitter, performance reviews, and other human resource documents," which would help employees claim compensation and challenge their termination, Cornet's complaint says.
He had previously developed a Google Chrome extension that would allow employees to download emails from their Gmail accounts and thereby save their documents more easily. Cornet says that the extension "does something that anybody can do manually without it."
Cornet then published this extension on the Chrome Web Store and shared it on a Slack channel for Twitter staff on November 1, per the complaint.
But later that day, Twitter both fired Cornet and removed the link to his extension from the Slack channel, per the complaint. He says he wasn't asked to take down the link prior to being terminated.
"Mr. Cornet alleges that Twitter selected him to be one of the first employees let go in its mass layoff, in retaliation for having assisting his fellow employees to help protect themselves in the event that they were laid off," the complaint says.
Cornet, who had been known for the satirical cartoons he drew while at Twitter and during his 10-year stint at Google, said in a blog post on November 1, the day he was fired: "My current understanding is that I was too much of a potential troublemaker for the new management."