In this case, what would strike achieve from people who Musk wants to not work anyway? Twitter literally closed EU facilities. I don't know any union law in any country that prevents company from closing facilities and eliminating all jobs.
They could afford to pay a lawyer a whole lot to fight layoffs and firings.
Not a perfect set of options, but better options than they have today.
No, they are all fired. Didn't you hear? Every EU software engineer has been fired.
Even in Ireland/UK which have pretty employer friendly labour laws, none of the FB employees have actually been laid off yet, they're still in a consultation period (till December I believe).
Unfortunately for US CEO's, the US labour law does not apply globally.
In theory that’s a bargaining chip that organized labor could have used (this would involve labor solidarity between the laid-off/fired workers and the ones he wanted to keep). Bringing in “scabs” with zero institutional knowledge to run the site effectively without torching his $30 billion equity investment could have been very difficult, especially since RTO in San Francisco is apparently valuable to him.
Engineering is cut down to about ~10% or less in many areas. A friend of mine told me their group is down to ~10 from 155 after 2/3 being laid off and about 90% of the remainder rejecting the "hardcore" ultimatum.
I'm expecting a lot of the non-SF facilities to close and those people to be fired as well. They should have considered geography more in the layoff, but because he had a bunch of Tesla goons deciding who to cut instead of people who know the business or HR professionals who know how to plan workforce reduction it doesn't seem like geographic distribution was considered. But it's certainly not economical to operate many office locations designed for hundreds with only a small fraction of that number still employed.