Private Employee’s Claim That He Was Fired for Political Tweet Can Proceed Under California Statutes
In Surdak v. DXC Technology (decided Dec. 20 by Judge Stanley Blumenfeld, Jr. (C.D. Cal.), but just posted a few days ago on Westlaw), plaintiff claimed he was fired (1) because of his “complaints … that he was not being paid all his wages” and (2) “in retaliation for posting a tweet on his personal Twitter account and complaining that DXC’s request that he remove the tweet constituted illegal censorship”; “Plaintiff’s colleague filed an internal complaint about the tweet, posted by Plaintiff, which stated, ‘I’ll have those niggers voting Democrat for the next 200 years,’ and attributed the quote to Lyndon B. Johnson.”
I’ll skip the wage complaint question here, and turn to the Tweet issue, which arises under California’s employee free speech statutes; opinions applying such statutes are fairly rare, though this one struck me as noteworthy:
However, Plaintiff also alleges that
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