Meta was sued by employees, accused of using an AI system to screen candidates for layoffs and unfairly targeting furloughed employees
Twenty-six Meta employees filed a lawsuit this week, alleging that the company's use of artificial intelligence systems to screen for layoffs unfairly affects employees who are taking sick leave, parental leave or family care leave. Meta previously announced that it would lay off 8,000 employees in May, accounting for about 10% of its total employees. The employees sued this time are among these laid-off employees. The lawsuit was filed in the federal court in Oakland, California, on Monday night. The lawsuit stated that the company used a variety of tools such as internal artificial intelligence systems, keyboard tapping and online activity monitoring data, artificial intelligence token usage panels, and algorithm-assisted performance rankings to delineate the layoff list. The lawsuit alleges that the rating system is flawed by design: Employees who are on legally protected sick leave, family care leave, or whose work output is reduced due to physical disabilities simply cannot accumulate adequate ratings. The complaint also stated that Meta did not take into account the statutory leave enjoyed by employees when calculating employee ratings, nor did it suspend the automated system as required by law to conduct a separate manual review that took into account leave and special convenience needs. The end result, the lawsuit says, is that employees taking legally protected sick leave or family care leave are disproportionately screened for layoffs. The 26 anonymous plaintiffs in this lawsuit all took statutory protected leave, and all applied for or received reasonable work accommodation adjustments from the company due to their own problems. Although they have received redundancy notices, 26 people are currently still employed and the formal separation process will begin on July 22. Many of the employees involved were on parental leave at the time. Many of the employees in this lawsuit were on pregnancy or parental leave, during which time they were unable to work, resulting in a significant drop in work output recorded by the system. Some employees also took sick leave, and one of them disclosed that he had "serious health problems and disabilities." The relevant certificates have been reviewed by Meta's partner medical institutions. But the complaint alleges that the employee's supervisor dissuaded and pressured him from taking sick leave and warned that taking time off would put him in line for subsequent layoffs. The complaint also says Meta failed to provide any reasonable work accommodations for his disability. Meta responded in a statement that the relevant accusations were "baseless and inconsistent with the facts. Decisions related to personnel adjustments and organizational structure have always been made manually, not by artificial intelligence." About half of the plaintiffs had taken time off to care for family members or for pregnancy-related matters. Eight of the women had taken maternity or pregnancy-related leave, four men had taken parental leave, and one woman had taken time off to care for a family member and then taken bereavement leave. The lawsuit alleges that the layoffs violated multiple state and federal laws, including the Family and Medical Leave Act, the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Pregnancy Discrimination Act and the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act. The complaint also references the long-standing civil rights legal concept of disparate impact liability, a legal rule that the Trump administration has sought to dismantle. The core provision of the principle of differential impact is: If a policy or management measure is neutral on the surface and does not discriminate, but brings a disproportionate adverse burden to a group of workers protected by law, and the measure is not necessary to carry out the work of the job, then the policy or measure constitutes discrimination.