SpaceX settles with underpaid employees for $4 million
Most of the 4,100 plaintiffs, however, will only get $500 each.
In 2016, a PayScale survey revealed that Tesla and SpaceX, both high-profile companies helmed by Elon Musk, are two of the lowest-paying employers in tech. A whopping 4,100 employees even filed a class-action lawsuit against Musk's space corporation for not giving them legally mandated breaks. Today, the company and the plaintiffs have finally agreed to settle that lawsuit for $4 million. According to Inverse, since $1.3 million will go to the plaintiffs' lawyers, most of them will only get $500 each, with the highest payout being $2,000.
Those amounts definitely look tiny when you take the company's $12+ billion valuation into account, so at least one plaintiff tried to block the deal from happening. The class-action lawsuit began as several individual ones filed from way back in 2014. See, workers in California are entitled to a rest period every four hours in addition to a lunch break. However, shifts within the company are reportedly structured so that the employees can't take those breaks. The plaintiffs said they weren't compensated for those extra hours either, prompting them to take the legal route.
