Ordinary Folks Cannot Do This

But Elon Musk's refusal to pay bills at Twitter has now been extended to paying for the arbitration hearings that the short form social media site imposed on its employees.

He's refused to pay the rent on offices, Google's cloud, promised bonuses to employees, Twitter's former PR firm, some former lawyers, etc.

With arbitration though, he's stuck in a no win situation.

Either he has to pay millions, if not tens of millions, of dollars in arbitration fees, or these folks can sue him in open court, probably as a class action, and they will beat him like a rented mule:

Twitter started this year with a legal victory that forced thousands of laid-off employees into arbitration. These employees had been suing over grievances like unpaid severance and discrimination, and the win spared Twitter from facing a class-action lawsuit. Now, hundreds of ex-employees have sued again, this time alleging in a class-action claim that "Twitter has refused to engage in arbitration—despite having compelled employees to arbitrate their claims."

According to the complaint, filed Monday in a San Francisco federal court, Twitter won't come to the table simply because the company doesn't want to pay for arbitration. Its arbitration agreements require ex-employees to pay a nominal filing fee to launch claims with the Judicial Arbitration and Mediation Services (JAMS), but after that, Twitter has to pay "all other arbitration fees."

Faced with paying perhaps millions in fees for approximately 2,000 laid-off employees, Twitter allegedly sent a letter to JAMS in early June, requesting that the fees instead be split between parties.

However, granting that request would be a breach of JAMS's rules. Thus, JAMS responded by telling Twitter that it would not proceed with any arbitration that did not meet JAMS's standards, the complaint said. After that, Twitter allegedly told JAMS that it "would refuse to proceed with arbitrations in most states outside California," attaching "a list of 891 arbitrations in which it was refusing to proceed."

Twitter's move to avoid paying arbitration fees put hundreds of ex-employees in a seemingly no-win situation, their complaint suggested. They had to choose between waiving Twitter's obligation to pay their arbitration fees or else risk JAMS declining to arbitrate their cases entirely.

Some of them decided instead to pursue a third option, asking a court to compel Twitter to engage in arbitration with "all former Twitter employees throughout the United States who have filed demands for arbitration against Twitter with JAMS."

Anyone who deals with Musk on anything but cash in advance is an idiot.

It's almost as hard to get paid for work done out of the Musk org as it is getting paid for work done by the Trump Org.