Impeached US president Donald Trump has been sued again. This time, TikTok employees are behind the latest suit. It is sparked by the executive order.
The impeached US presidents war on social media has sparked another lawsuit. This time, TikTok employees are separately suing the corrupt president for lost wages. Earlier, Trump signed an executive order banning TikTok within 45 days. TikTok itself threatened to sue over the unconstitutional nature of the executive order. As we reported earlier this week, TikTok followed through on that threat and sued the president.
It seems that TikTok isn’t the only one justifiably litigating the president over the executive order. TikTok employees are also following suit in filing a lawsuit against Trump. Two weeks ago, employees threatened to sue the president. From CNET at the time:
TikTok’s US employees are planning to file a lawsuit challenging a Trump administration executive order they say would make it illegal for their employer to pay them.
Last week, President Donald Trump issued an executive order barring any US transactions with ByteDance, the Chinese company that owns TikTok, and its subsidiaries. The language of the order is broad, so it’s unclear if it would bar TikTok from paying its employees. The Trump administration didn’t respond to questions about how the order would impact TikTok’s employees.
The order, which would take effect Sept. 20, would effectively ban the short-form video app from operating in the US if ByteDance doesn’t sell TikTok. Microsoft has acknowledged it’s discussing a deal to buy TikTok’s service in the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Negotiations could be completed by Sept. 15, which is before the executive order’s deadline.
Mike Godwin, a prominent internet rights lawyer, said in a tweet Thursday that he’s one of the attorneys working on a lawsuit against the Trump administration.
“I believe that the U.S. government with its overbroad executive order has put employees’ Constitutional rights, including the right to be paid, in jeopardy,” he tweeted.
I'm proud to be one of the lawyers now working on this case to defend TikTok employees' rights. I believe that the U.S. government with its overbroad executive order has put employees' Constitutional rights, including the right to be paid, in jeopardy. https://t.co/rQG2hZeX02
— Mike Godwin (@sfmnemonic) August 13, 2020
Now, it seems that the threat is being fully realized. According to The Hill, the lawsuit has now been formally filed:
The Trump administration was hit with a second TikTok lawsuit Monday when an employee of the social media firm sued in an attempt to block enforcement of an order that he says could prevent U.S.-based workers from receiving their paychecks.
In a lawsuit filed in the federal court for the Northern District of California, Patrick Ryan, a technical program manager at TikTok, alleged that President Trump’s order banning the short-form video app in the U.S. violates employees’ constitutional right to due process.
He also alleged the order’s ban on transactions with the app means that roughly 1,500 U.S.-based employees of TikTok and its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, are at risk of losing their paychecks.
The complaint asks the court to stop the administration from extending the effect of the executive order on U.S.-based TikTok workers’ wages and salaries.
Earlier in the day, the company filed a lawsuit in federal court in California that similarly argues Trump’s order violates due process rights.
“We made a lot of similar arguments and claims,” said Alexander Urbelis, a partner with Blackstone Law Group, the firm that filed the suit on behalf of Ryan. “From our perspective, this is about protecting the wages and salaries of families and employees.”
All of this is happening in the backdrop of an impending US election during a time when over 180,000 American’s have lost their lives from COVID-19. In response, there have been many protests against the president over the administrations overall incompetence, lies, corruption, and more. On top of that, the US economy has shrank, logging the worst quarter in American history in July of this year – an economic moment that is being described as “3 months of hell”. As a result of all of this, it might be hard for this lawsuit to make any headway in all of this.
Luckily, courts care less about the news cycle and more about what is before them, so at the very least, the employees are going to have their day in court.
Drew Wilson on Twitter: @icecube85 and Facebook.
