Elon Musk, SpaceX at center of lawsuit over abusive labor practices

Elon Musk, the entrepreneur behind the online payment service PayPal, electric car company Tesla Motors and private space company SpaceX has found himself the target of lawsuits over illegal and unsavory treatment of his employees.

Bloomberg reports that two engineers filed the lawsuits in a California court. They were employees working at the SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne. One of the lawsuits alleges that SpaceX fired 400 employees with less than 60-days notice, a violation of California law. The engineers filed the lawsuits on behalf of all the employees who lost their jobs.

The law one of the lawsuits claims SpaceX violated requires that companies with at least 75 employees who wish to lay off more than 50 employees at a time must provide a 60-day notice before the layoffs commence.

The lawsuit is seeking 60 days of back pay and $500 in civil fines for each day the law was violated. The Los Angeles Times says that the lawsuit is demanding the back pay with an unspecified amount of interest.

Another lawsuit claims that SpaceX made employees work off the clock while not providing legally mandated rest and meal breaks. Those allegations go all the way back to 2010.

California law mandates the provision of a 30-minute meal break for every five hours an employee works, according to the Times. California law also requires a 10-minute rest break for every four hours of work.

If those meal and rest breaks are not given, California law says that employees must be compensated with an extra hour of pay.

The lawsuit further claims that the company failed to provide employees some of the tools necessary to do their jobs, and did not reimburse employees when they bought them themselves.