![]() ![]() Liss-Riordan interacted with company through drivers who felt it was taking their tips, but she instantly took issue with Uber’s entire business model-namely, creating an entire workforce of independent contractors. Then she encountered her white whale: Uber. In the span of two years, Liss-Riordan sued on behalf of FedEx drivers, janitors, and even strippers who felt they’d been cheated out of employee status. ![]() Companies often use contractors to fill gaps in their full-time labor force, but Liss-Riordan felt many were overusing them to avoid paying benefits like health care and overtime. She estimates that over the course of her career she has won more than half a billion dollars for workers.Īt the same time, Liss-Riordan became interested in workers who felt they had been misclassified as independent contractors instead of employees. (It was the skycaps who dubbed her “Sledgehammer Shannon.”)īetween 20, according to a Boston Globe analysis, she brought at least 40 lawsuits on behalf of tipped employees in 2012, she won a $14.1 million settlement for Starbucks baristas. In 2006, she secured an estimated $2.5 million in damages for wait staff at Hilltop Steakhouse in Saugus two years later, she got American Airlines to pay nine local skycaps more than $325,000 in lost tips. Liss-Riordan quickly became the firm’s resident expert in securing lost wages for tipped employees, using an obscure state law that prevented managers from dipping into the tip pool. “Because you don’t just hang out a shingle in Boston.” “I thought that was just an amazing confidence,” Lichten recalled of their interview, which Liss-Riordan conducted from her honeymoon in Thailand. As an ambitious 29-year-old fresh out of Harvard Law School and a federal clerkship in Texas, Liss-Riordan joined a small firm in Boston in hopes of “hanging out a shingle,” according to Harold Lichten, the partner who interviewed her for the job. “It’s really important that our laws have teeth so that it’s not just like a traffic ticket for the richest man in the world.”īefore she was fighting Silicon Valley stalwarts, Liss-Riordan was advocating for waiters, bartenders, and bellhops in Massachusetts. “There needs to be a real deterrent to make sure that corporations employers protect the rights of their employees and don’t think they can just get away with it,” she added. “I find it really concerning when the richest man in the world-well, now the formerly richest man in the world-thinks that he can do whatever he wants and is above the law,” she told The Daily Beast. Her plan, she says, is to convince the multi-billionaire that paying his laid-off employees would be easier than fighting them all in court. Today, the attorney has filed four lawsuits on behalf of laid-off Twitter employees, alleging transgressions ranging from disability discrimination to Title VII violations. She has also attracted her share of critics: Opponents of her failed bid for Massachusetts attorney general pointed to the millions she earned from her signature class-action suits, suggesting she was more interested in money than the movement-charges she forcefully denies. A chatty 53-year-old Boston transplant, Liss-Riordan has sued tech companies from Uber to DoorDash and won judgments of up to $100 million on behalf of their workers. But Liss-Riordan, a labor rights veteran once dubbed “Sledgehammer Shannon,” was perhaps the best-equipped attorney in the country to handle the case. The mass layoffs at Twitter in November-a proverbial Red Wedding that cut the staff in half-has proven fertile ground for lawsuits. “But when things started happening-oh, she was ready.” “It was kind of like, ‘OK, let’s wait and see how this goes,’” De Caires recalled of that first conversation. The first email was to a Massachusetts attorney named Shannon Liss-Riordan, who had filed a lawsuit against Tesla months earlier. But the engineer had doubts, and started looking for labor rights attorneys with a history of dealing with powerful tech companies. ![]() Twitter higher-ups promised to stick to a generous severance package in the event of a Musk takeover, De Caires says. ![]() “I get fascinated and interested in things very easily,” explained DeCaires, who uses they/them pronouns. Unlike many, the 25-year-old had closely followed the legal battle between the billionaire and the social media company and read every page of the merger agreement. Like others, De Caires, a Twitter software engineer of three and a half years, predicted a Musk takeover would come with mass layoffs. Earlier this year, as Elon Musk looked increasingly likely to lose his court battle and be forced into purchasing Twitter, Justine De Caires started to get nervous. ![]()
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