Friday, 14 August 2020_Chinese owner of social media app, TikTok and its American employees are planning to sue US President Donald Trump’s administration over a ban on the popular video-sharing service.
Last week, Trump issued executive orders that would ban TikTok and WeChat from operating in the US if they are not sold by their Chinese-owned parent companies within 45 days.
According to Mike Godwin, a lawyer who represents the employees, their legal challenge to Trump's executive order will be separate from a pending lawsuit from Chinese parent company ByteDance.
“Employees correctly recognize that their jobs are in danger and their payment is in danger right now,” said Godwin.
It is not clear if Trump’s order will make it illegal for TikTok to pay its roughly 1,500 workers in the US, he said.
“We have to proceed very quickly,” Godwin said. “If we wait around for the order to be enforced, which it will be on September 20, then the workers will lose their chances to be paid.”
The order would prohibit “any transaction by any person” with TikTok and ByteDance.
TikTok said last week that it was “shocked by the recent Executive Order, which was issued without any due process.”
The app said in a statement that it spent nearly a year trying to engage in "good faith" with Washington to address its concerns.
"What we encountered instead was that the administration paid no attention to facts, dictated terms of an agreement without going through standard legal processes, and tried to insert itself into negotiations between private businesses," it said.
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