Meta employees sue over use of AI in workforce reduction

SAN FRANCISCO (CN) — A group of current and former Meta employees sued the company Monday after the social media giant reduced its workforce by 10% using an artificial intelligence model to select certain workers.

The 26 unnamed plaintiffs filed the suit in the Northern District of California federal court, claiming Meta began notifying employees on May 20 of a “mass reduction in force” and used an AI system to target workers who took or requested protected leave.

“Meta did not assemble the termination list through the considered judgment of managers who knew the work,” the plaintiffs write in their 71-page complaint. “Instead, Meta used a constellation of internal artificial-intelligence systems — including a system referred to internally as ‘Metamate,’ employee-trained ‘second-brain’ agents, keystroke- and activity-monitoring data, AI-token-usage dashboards, and algorithmically assisted performance ranking and calibration — to score, rank and select employees for inclusion on the list.”

Because the AI used performance ratings, productivity and other output metrics, the plaintiffs say the system, by design, would exclude employees who had taken time away from work and didn’t have as many metrics to measure against other employees.

“The result was that employees who took protected leaves were disproportionately selected for layoff, based on scoring that not only failed to account for their protected leaves, but in effect penalized the employees for exercising their legal rights to these leaves,” the plaintiffs write.

The plaintiffs work in various roles across Meta throughout the U.S., including in California, Florida, Illinois, New York, Pennsylvania and Washington state. They say they share one thing in common: All took, requested or were approved for protected leave within the past 24 months.

Because Meta requires employees to sign a mutual arbitration agreement with a class action waiver, the plaintiffs seek to pursue their claims individually in arbitration. They are asking the court for injunctive relief to stop their terminations and restore their employment status as of May 20. Their claims include violations of state-protected leave laws, the Family and Medical Leave Act, the Pregnancy Discrimination Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act.

In April, Meta announced plans to lay off about 8,000 employees, roughly 10% of its workforce, while “several thousand additional employees would be reassigned to new artificial intelligence initiatives, as Meta sought to remake itself into an ‘A.I.-first’ company,” the plaintiffs say.

Earlier in the year, Meta developed a monitoring program that captured keystrokes, screen content, mouse activity, browser history, messages, emails and voice, video and location data on company-issued devices.

“The data gathered through the employee-tracking program was used to build A.I. tools, including by a new engineering organization to which employees were reassigned on a non-optional basis,” the plaintiffs write.

The plaintiffs say Meta’s deployment of the monitoring program was “announced through a low-visibility internal post — made by an engineer rather than a senior leader, in a secondary group rather than Meta’s official employee-notice channel — with little notice and no consent or click-through acknowledgment; on at least some teams, employees received no consent or acknowledgment prompt at all, and, at least initially, there was no way to opt out.”

U.S. District Judge William Orrick, a Barack Obama appointee, is assigned to the case.

In a statement, a Meta spokesperson said, “These claims lack merit and are not based on facts. Workforce management and organizational decisions were and are made by people, not AI.”

Attorneys representing the plaintiffs did not immediately respond to a request for comment.