Twitter illegally fired a worker who pushed back at Elon Musk’s RTO demands, says NLRB

• Elon Musk’s X has been accused of breaking federal law for firing an employee who complained about return-to-office mandates.
• Yao Yue tweeted “don’t resign, let him fire you,” in response to Musk’s hardline RTO mandate.
• Five days later she was fired for breaking an unspecified company policy.

Twitter illegally fired an employee who complained about Elon Musk’s return-to-office mandates, the National Labor Relations Board said.

In the formal complaint issued by the NLRB on Friday, the company now called X is accused of breaking a federal law that prohibits businesses from punishing employees for communicating or organizing with others about working conditions.

It’s the first case filed by the NLRB against X and refers to the response from a former employee to Musk’s statement that staff who didn’t start coming into the office would be fired.

“If you can physically make it to an office and you don’t show up, resignation accepted,” Musk said.

The complaint says that Yao Yue, a principal software engineer, criticized Musk’s policy, tweeting “don’t resign, let him fire you,” and posting “don’t be fired. Seriously” in a company Slack channel, CNBC reported.

Yue was then fired five days later in November, with the only explanation given was that she’d violated an unspecified company policy.

The complaint states that X “unlawfully discharged the employee for exercising their right to protected concerted activity under the National Labor Relations Act,” per Axios.

Shortly after taking control of Twitter late last year, Musk reversed a remote work policy put in place by former CEO Jack Dorsey.

Musk’s been consistently adamant about workers at his companies, from X to Tesla, being in the office five days a week – going as far as calling remote work “morally wrong.”

His attempts to enforce these strict RTO policies have seen him monitor internal communication and fire staff for criticizing him, in circumstances not dissimilar to Yue’s case.

In one example previously reported by Insider, Daniel Fletcher, who appeared to be a software engineer at Twitter, tweeted: “I’ve been fired for unspecified recent behavior in violation of unnamed company policy i.e. hanging out in the #social-watercooler.” He had also retweeted some posts that were critical of Musk’s leadership.

A hearing for Yue’s complaint is scheduled for January 30 in San Francisco.

The NLRB and X did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Insider, made outside normal working hours.