Because artificial intelligence is said to have led to their termination by Meta Platforms, 26 people in the USA are taking the company to court. He denies the allegations. The final clarification will remain secret: Meta forces its (former) employees into individual, non-public arbitration proceedings.
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Nevertheless, the legal dispute begins in court. The 26 plaintiffs have each applied for an interim injunction in a US federal district court: It is intended to temporarily secure the jobs and the associated claims until the arbitration proceedings for the respective employees have been completed.
The background is the mass termination by Meta Platforms on May 20th. At that time, ten percent of the workforce was thrown out onto the streets, including the 26 plaintiffs. They are not shaking the principles of this wave of layoffs. However, in their cases, Meta violated applicable labor law by disregarding protective provisions for employees with certain disabilities or special forms of sick leave.
Sture KI Ranking
Meta used several internal artificial intelligences to create a ranking of all employees. This list was then the basis for the decision as to who would (not) be retained. According to the lawsuit, the consumption of AI tokens by the respective employee, the monitoring of their keyboard and other activities, the “second brain” agents trained by the employees themselves, the company’s internal chatbot Metamate and other ranking algorithms had an influence.
But this approach automatically disadvantages people who are sick, have just had a child or have certain disabilities. For example, anyone who is not working does not consume any AI tokens, which leads to a worse algorithmic rating. Meta failed to correct the rankings accordingly, even though this was legally required.
The plaintiffs are in particular women on maternity leave and parents on statutory parental leave, but also an accident victim, several disabled people who had agreed on certain work adjustments with Meta, and employees with legally protected sick leave. In two cases, meta-managers are said to have even prevented sick people from taking protected sick leave because this would lead to dismissal as part of the wave of dismissals. They were still fired.
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Meta says it wasn’t AI but managers who decided who would be kicked out. The lawsuit is therefore baseless. The procedure is called Does 1 through 26 v Meta Platforms and is pending in the United States District Court for Northern California (Case 3:26-cv-07122).
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