The plaintiffs say a monitoring program put in place earlier this year provided artificial intelligence data to select employees for layoffs.
SAN FRANCISCO (CN) – A group of current and former Meta employees sued the company on Monday after the social media giant cut its workforce by 10% by using an artificial intelligence model to select some workers.
The 26 unnamed plaintiffs filed the suit in the Federal District Court for the Northern District of California, alleging that Meta began notifying employees on May 20 of a “massive reduction in force” and used an AI system to target workers who took or requested protected leave.
“Meta did not assemble the termination list with the considered judgment of executives who knew the job,” the plaintiffs say in their 71-page filing. complaint. “Instead, Meta used a suite of internal artificial intelligence systems – including a system referred to internally as ‘Metamate’, ‘second brain’ agents trained by employees, keystroke and activity monitoring data, AI token usage dashboards, and algorithmically assisted selection of employee results in ranking and ranking of employee results.
Because AI used performance ratings, productivity and other production metrics, the plaintiffs say the system, by design, would exclude employees who took time off work and didn’t have enough metrics to measure against other employees.
“The result was that employees taking protected leave were disproportionately singled out for furloughs based on points that not only did not take into account their protected leave, but actually penalized employees for exercising their legal rights to such leave,” the plaintiffs say.
Plaintiffs work in various roles throughout Meta across the US, including in California, Florida, Illinois, New York, Pennsylvania and Washington. They say they have one thing in common: All received, applied for or were approved for protected leave within the past 24 months.
Because Meta requires employees to sign a mutual arbitration agreement with a collective action waiver, plaintiffs seek to pursue their claims individually in arbitration. They are asking the court for urgent measures 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 return to being an ‘He-first’ company,” the plaintiffs say.
Earlier in the year, Meta developed a monitoring program that captured keyboard, screen content, mouse activity, browser history, messages, email, and voice, video, and location data on company-issued devices.
“Data collected through the employee tracking program was used to build AI tools, including by a new engineering organization to which employees were reassigned on a non-optional basis,” the plaintiffs say.
The plaintiffs say that Meta’s deployment of the monitoring program “was announced via a low-visibility internal posting — made by an engineer, not a senior executive, to a secondary group and not to Meta’s official employee notification channel — with little notice and no click-through consent or acknowledgment; at least on some teams, employees received no consent, at least not all employees. initially, there was no way to opt out.”
U.S. District Judge William Orrick, a Barack Obama appointee, has been assigned to the case.
Attorneys representing the plaintiffs and Meta did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
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