Dozens of Meta employees sue, allege AI use for layoffs affects workers on protected leave

A aggroup of 26 Meta employees has sued the keep company, claiming it used unreal intelligence agency systems to select people for layoffs, disproportionately targeting those on medical, maternal or family leave.

They are among the 8,000 employees, or about 10 per cent of its workforce, Meta said it would lay off in May. The lawsuit filed late Monday in federal court in Oakland, Calif., claims the company used internal AI systems, keystroke and activity-monitoring data, AI token-usage dashboards and algorithmically assisted performance rankings, among other methods, to determine who would be laid off.

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Many of these scores and ratings "by design, cannot be accumulated by an employee who is on protected medical or family leave, or whose output is reduced by a disability," the lawsuit says.

Meta, according to the lawsuit, did not account for protected leave when taking employees' scores into account and "did not pause the system for the individualized, leave- and accommodation-neutral review that the law requires."

As a result, people on protected medical or family leave were disproportionately selected for layoffs, the lawsuit says. Each of the 26 anonymous employees in the lawsuit took protected leave, or requested or received a reasonable accommodation for disability.

Though they have been notified of their layoffs, all 26 remain employed by Meta, with separations set to begin July 22.

Many of the employees in the lawsuit took pregnancy or parental leave, during which time they wouldn't have worked and thus had their measured output reduced. Others took medical leave — one disclosed a "serious health condition and disability" that was approved by Meta's own provider.

But according to the lawsuit, he was "discouraged and deterred from taking that leave by a manager" who warned that doing so would result in his selection for the anticipated layoffs. Meta offered no accommodation for his disability, the lawsuit says.

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Meta said in a statement that the claims "lack merit and are not based on facts. Workforce management and organizational decisions were and are made by people, not AI."

About half the plaintiffs said they had taken leave for caregiving or pregnancy-related reasons. Eight are women who had taken maternity or pregnancy-related leave, four are men who had taken parental leave and one is a woman who had taken leave to care for a family member and later bereavement leave.

The lawsuit claims the layoffs violated several 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 plaintiffs' lawyers said in a statement that the lawsuit asks for one thing — preserving the status quo to keep the workers employed pending arbitration.

That's because "once these separations are final, the harms are irreversible: employer-subsidized health coverage lost during pregnancy, postpartum recovery, and active medical treatment; time-bound leave rights extinguished; unvested equity forfeited; and immigration consequences triggered."

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