Members of the Communications Workers’ Union (CWU) employed at Covalen in Sandyford, south Dublin, will strike next Tuesday, January 6th, in a dispute relating to redundancy proposals for up to 420 staff.
The union says several hundred staff at the company will stop work at 1.30pm, with additional strike action currently planned for January 15th, 16th and 23rd if no agreement is reached.
The staff are seeking improved terms for workers to be let go in the redundancy programme, as well as collective representation by the union, it says. They are also seeking clarity on how many jobs might be saved through redeployment.
The company says it “has always prioritised direct and open engagement with our employees and while we fully respect the right of employees to take industrial action, we have been proactively consulting with our teams”.
It added: “Covalen is working hard on its redeployment programme and has successfully redeployed a significant number of employees, 99 employees to date. The company is continuing to work with the teams impacted and expect to make further offers of redeployment over the coming weeks.”
The company is a major provider of content moderation services for Facebook parent Meta. It announced the job cuts in November, saying changes in demand for its services were “common and require scaling both up and down”.
There is some acceptance of this on the part of the union. However, its deputy general secretary, Ian McArdle, says there is considerable frustration among those whose jobs are at risk over the level of engagement since the announcement.
There is also anger, he says, over the company’s stated intention to pay only statutory redundancy. This would mean many staff receiving very small payments, while those with less than two years’ service would get nothing.
“That’s exactly the position that they’ve communicated to the staff,” said Mr McArdle. He argues that the proposal is at odds with the more generous terms usually seen in the tech sector.
“This is very much in contrast to the redundancy programmes we have seen in the tech sector in Ireland over the last two years,” he said. “The sector has gone through significant redundancy programmes but all of them have been based on enhanced, ex-gracia payments.
“Covalen are very profitable. They’ve done very well out of the Meta contract. They’re part of CPL . . . This is a large operation that can afford to do the right thing. But here they are, for some reason, opting not to do so.”
Covalen is a subsidiary of the larger CPL, a major employer in Ireland. Covalen’s accounts for 2024 show it has a turnover of €722 million and a net profit of €26.2 million.
The cuts were announced a month after Meta in the US said it would shed some roles in the area of content moderation. It said this was due to technological advances and the greater use of AI systems to carry out the work.
The 420 job losses would come from a workforce of about 2,000. Many of those likely to be impacted carry out annotation work, which involves looking at and assessing online content.