“We trained bots. We did the grind. Now we’re being left behind,” chanted a horde of contract workers who gathered outside Meta’s office in Dublin, Ireland, on Friday afternoon. Waving flags, waving signs and armed with whistles and vuvuzelas, they went to protest the planned layoffs.
The staff are employed by Dublin-based Covalen, which provides content moderation and data labeling services that help Meta improve its AI products. In April, Covalen told 700 workers that their jobs were at risk, citing “reduced demand,” WIRED reported.
A large proportion of affected workers will not receive any severance pay because they have been employed for less than two years. The rest receive the minimum amount required by local labor laws – two weeks’ salary for each year of employment – according to the Communication Workers Union (CWU), of which Covalen workers are members.
“We only get crumbs,” Aadel Obaid, a team manager at Covalen who is part of the planned layoffs, tells WIRED. “Give us a piece of cake.”
Photo: Joel Khalili
To force Covalen to change its severance package, workers voted to strike outside the company’s headquarters and then went to Meta’s nearby European headquarters. According to John Bohan, an organizer at CWU, Meta could use its advantage as a major client to pressure Covalen to offer its employees a higher severance package. Workers are demanding double the amount currently offered and at least some form of compensation for workers who do not meet the two-year threshold.
The company may also exempt Covalen employees from a “hold period,” which prevents them from working on another Meta account for six months after being laid off, Bohan says. (Meta previously identified WIRED’s downtime as an industry standard.)
At 1 p.m. local time on Friday, striking workers began gathering outside Covalen’s headquarters, a red-brick office building on a mostly residential street in the heart of Dublin. The protests began with a wall of sound: workers banged drums, hooted, whistled, shouted and screamed. Then there was a volley of chanted calls and responses, led by an employee with a bullhorn. The building’s security guard watched from the lobby, hands on hips, stunned.
Two hours later, the group – now more than 150 people – began marching down the middle of a mile-long stretch of road to the Meta campus, slowing traffic to a crawl. Dubliners enjoying the early start of summer stopped staring; some applauded. When protesters reached the Meta complex, two security guards stood with their arms crossed, blocking their path. The group lined up at the gates and began another round of chants: “We scrub the karma. We take the pain. The meta benefits from our effort.”