By Daniel Wiessner
(Reuters) - A federal judge in San Francisco has ruled that roughly 150 older workers who were laid off by social media platform X when Elon Musk acquired the company can sue for age discrimination as a class, exposing the company to millions of dollars in potential damages.
U.S. District Judge Susan Illston in a decision released late Tuesday said the case presented a common question over the impact that a 2022 mass layoff at the company had on workers 50 and older.
Plaintiff John Zeman, who worked in X's communications department when the company was called Twitter, sued in 2023. He said in his lawsuit that X laid off 60% of employees who were 50 or older and nearly three-quarters of those who were over 60, compared with 54% of employees younger than 50.
"Plaintiff has shown beyond mere speculation that Twitter may have discriminated against older employees in the November 4, 2022 (mass layoff), which constitutes a single decision that affected all members of the proposed class," Illston wrote.
Tuesday's ruling allows Zeman's lawyers to send notice of the lawsuit to potential class members, giving them a chance to opt into the case.
X did not respond to a request for comment. The company has denied engaging in discrimination and has said it eliminated the entire communications department where Zeman worked after Musk took over, regardless of those workers' ages.
Shannon Liss-Riordan, a lawyer for Zeman and about 2,000 other former Twitter employees who have brought a series of legal claims against the company, said she was pleased with the ruling.
The lawsuit is one of about a dozen X has faced stemming from Musk's decision to lay off more than half of Twitter's workforce in 2022.
Those cases include various claims, all of which X has denied, including that the company laid off employees and contractors without the required advance notice, targeted women for layoffs, and forced out workers with disabilities by banning remote work.
In August, two judges separately dismissed the sex and disability bias cases while allowing the plaintiffs to file amended complaints fleshing out their claims.
Two other lawsuits claim the company owes former employees at least $500 million in severance pay. One of those cases was dismissed in July.