{"id":801676,"date":"2026-07-15T11:04:11","date_gmt":"2026-07-15T11:04:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/801676\/"},"modified":"2026-07-15T11:04:11","modified_gmt":"2026-07-15T11:04:11","slug":"26-employees-sue-meta-over-claims-ai-systems-selected-workers-for-lay-offs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/801676\/","title":{"rendered":"26 employees sue Meta over claims AI systems selected workers for lay-offs"},"content":{"rendered":"

A group of 26 US Meta employees has sued the company, claiming it used AI systems to identify people for lay-offs, disproportionately targeting those on medical, parental or family leave.<\/p>\n

They are among the 8,000 employees, or about 10 per cent of its workforce, whom Meta said it would lay off in May.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The lawsuit, filed late on Monday, local time, in a federal court in California, 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 made redundant.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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Meta, according to the lawsuit, did not account for protected leave when calculating employees’ scores and “did not pause the system for the individualized, leave- and accommodation-neutral review that the law requires”.<\/p>\n

As a result, people on protected medical or family leave were disproportionately selected for dismissal, the lawsuit says.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Each of the 26 unnamed employees in the lawsuit took protected leave and requested or received a reasonable accommodation for disability.<\/p>\n

Though they have been notified of their lay-offs, all 26 remain employed by Meta, with separations set to begin July 22.<\/p>\n

\"Close<\/p>\n

The lawsuit alleges keystroke and activity-monitoring data were used to determine who was laid off. (Unsplash: Glenn Carstens-Peters)<\/p>\n

Many workers were on parental leave<\/p>\n

Many of the employees in the lawsuit took pregnancy or parental leave, during which time they would not have worked and thus had their measured output reduced.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Others took medical leave; one disclosed a “serious health condition and disability” that was approved by Meta’s own provider.<\/p>\n

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 lay-offs.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Meta offered no accommodation for his disability, the lawsuit says.<\/p>\n

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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”.<\/p>\n

About half the plaintiffs had taken leave for caregiving or pregnancy-related reasons.<\/p>\n

Eight are women who took maternity or pregnancy-related leave, four are men who took parental leave, and one is a woman who took leave to care for a family member and later bereavement leave.<\/p>\n

The lawsuit says the lay-offs 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.<\/p>\n

\"2026-02-19T005606Z_355104707_RC2OOJAJ8C6F_RTRMADP_3_SOCIALMEDIA-TRIAL\"<\/p>\n

Meta Platforms chief executive Mark Zuckerberg runs major tech platforms such as Instagram and Facebook.\u00a0 (Reuters: Mike Blake)<\/p>\n

Lawsuit cites ‘disparate impact’<\/p>\n

The complaint also references “disparate impact liability,” a longstanding civil rights concept that the Trump administration moved to abandon.<\/p>\n

Disparate impact, codified in Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, holds that facially neutral policies or practices can be discriminatory if they disproportionately burden a protected class of workers and are not necessary for the job.<\/p>\n

The Trump administration ordered federal agencies to prioritise disparate impact liability enforcement, arguing that its use undermines “meritocracy” and encourages the assumption that any racial or gender imbalance in a workforce is the result of discrimination.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The order has led the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) to drop discrimination cases on behalf of some workers.<\/p>\n

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However, the lawsuit against Meta underscores that companies remain vulnerable to disparate impact litigation in the age of AI despite the Trump administration’s efforts to stamp out its enforcement.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Workers are still free to pursue such lawsuits on their own if the EEOC rejects their complaints, and several state laws specifically prohibit disparate impact discrimination.<\/p>\n

In the case against Meta, the plaintiffs argued that the company’s “algorithmically assisted selection process, by systematically recording such absences as reduced performance, falls more heavily on women than on men”.<\/p>\n

That is because women disproportionately take pregnancy and caregiving leave, according to the lawyers.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The lawsuit cites Title VII’s prohibition on employment practices that have a disparate impact, as well as a landmark 1971 Supreme Court ruling that recognised the doctrine.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

That is because “once these separations are final, the harms are irreversible: employer-subsidised health coverage lost during pregnancy, postpartum recovery and active medical treatment; time-bound leave rights extinguished; unvested equity forfeited; and immigration consequences triggered”.<\/p>\n

AP<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A group of 26 US Meta employees has sued the company, claiming it used AI systems to identify…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":714204,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[254,64,63,99,10934,2462,17109,1333,1055],"class_list":["post-801676","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-business","tag-discrimination","tag-lawsuit","tag-layoffs","tag-meta","tag-united-states"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/801676","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=801676"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/801676\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/714204"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=801676"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=801676"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=801676"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}