LoaderSave StorySave this storyCommentLoaderSave StorySave this story“We trained the bots. We did the grind. Now we’re being left behind,” chanted a horde of contract workers who gathered outside Meta’s offices in Dublin, Ireland on Friday afternoon. Waving flags, brandishing signs, and armed with whistles and vuvuzelas, they were out to protest a round of planned layoffs.
The workers are employed by Dublin-based company Covalen, which handles content moderation and data labeling services that help Meta to fine-tune its AI products. In April, Covalen told 700 employees that their jobs were at risk, citing “reduced demand,” WIRED reported.
A large swath of the affected workers won’t receive any severance because they’ve been employed for less than two years. The rest are being offered the minimum payout required under local labor laws—two weeks’ pay for every year of employment—according to the Communications Workers’ Union (CWU), whose members include Covalen employees.
“We’re just getting the crumbs here,” Aadel Obaid, a team manager at Covalen who is part of the planned layoffs, tells WIRED. “Give us a little bit of the pie.”
Photograph: Joel KhaliliTo try to compel Covalen into revising the severance package, workers voted to strike outside the company’s corporate office, before marching to Meta’s nearby European headquarters. According to John Bohan, an organizer at the CWU, Meta could use its leverage as an anchor client to pressure Covalen into offering its employees an enhanced severance package. The workers are asking for double what’s currently being offered—and at least some form of payment for workers who don’t meet the two-year threshold.
The company could also release Covalen workers from a “cooldown period” preventing them from working on another Meta account for six months after being laid off, Bohan says. (Meta previously described the cooldown period to WIRED as an industry standard.)
At 1PM local time on Friday, the striking workers began to gather outside Covalen’s corporate headquarters, a red-brick office building on an otherwise largely residential street in the heart of Dublin. The protests began with a wall of sound: the workers beat drums, booed, whistled, shouted, and catcalled. Then came a volley of call-and-response chants led by a worker with a megaphone. The building's security guard watched, bemused from inside the lobby, hands on his hips.
Two hours later, the group—now more than 150 people—began to march down the center of the mile-long stretch of road to Meta’s campus, slowing the trailing traffic to a crawl. Dubliners enjoying the early onset of summer stopped to gawp; some applauded. When the protesters arrived at Meta’s complex, two security guards stood with crossed arms, blocking the way. The group set up at the gates and began another round of chants: “We scrub the feed. We take the pain. Meta profits from our strain.”
Covalen did not respond immediately to a request for comment. Meta spokesperson Erica Sackin told WIRED the company would be “reducing our reliance on third-party vendors and strengthening our internal systems.” She added that those protesting weren't Meta employees, and said the staffing decisions were up to Covalen.
Photograph: Joel KhaliliThe latest round of layoffs marks the second time that Covalen has cut staff since November. Between the two cuts, Covalen’s headcount stands to be slashed by almost half, according to the CWU. The majority of the workers caught up in the latest layoffs are data annotators. Their job involves checking material generated by Meta’s AI models for illicit content, and cooking up prompts meant to bypass safety guardrails. “It’s quite a grueling job,” Nick Bennett, one of the affected employees, previously told WIRED. “There was a stage where we had to spend days on end pretending to be suicidal or a pedophile.”
Meta is currently undergoing sweeping layoffs of its own. In April, the company told employees it would cut its workforce by 10 percent—or 8,000 people. But while Meta employees are reportedly in line to receive four months’ pay, plus two weeks for every year of employment, Covalen staffers are set to receive far less. “These workers exist in a situation where they're constantly using Meta tools, they're on Meta platforms,” says Bohan, the CWU organizer. “But they're denied all the privileges and benefits of Meta staff.”
“It’s infuriating,” says Owen O’Reilly, a content moderator at Covalen whose job isn't at risk but participated in the strike to support colleagues. “It makes us feel as if we really have no worth.”
Though Covalen has cycled some of the affected workers into alternative roles since announcing the layoffs, the remainder are due to lose their jobs at the end of June, according to the CWU.
Before Friday’s march, workers had already mounted two days of strikes, picketing outside the Covalen office. At a strike on May 15, one Covalen worker brandished a sign that read, “Zuck the Cuck Loves Watching His Contractors Get F#CK€D.” The union’s members plan to participate in escalating industrial action over the next month.
One of the striking Covalen workers, Amine Mouhouvi, says he was told he would be laid off a month after emigrating from France to take up a role as a data annotator. Because of the cooldown clause, he is unable to pursue a job with another Meta contractor until the end of the year. “It’s virtually forcing me to be unemployed for six months,” he tells WIRED. “If you’re not going to give us benefits, at least let us work.”
Photograph: Joel KhaliliThe permissiveness of Irish labor laws means the odds are ultimately stacked against the striking workers. Unlike in the US or UK, where employers are required to recognize a union that wins the support of enough employees, there are no such provisions in Ireland. “The big weakness in Ireland is this utter inability even to get the employer to sit down,” says Michael Doherty, a professor of law at Maynooth University who specializes in labor disputes. “It’s pretty much open season.” Covalen has not chosen to recognize the CWU, the union says.
Though workers might try to appeal to Meta executives’ sense of morality, Doherty has doubts. “Call me cynical, but I don’t believe much in morals when it comes to labor rights,” he says.
Though the Covalen workers recognize what they’re up against, they hope to make themselves heard. “We’re here because it’s the right thing to do,” says Tulio Dias de Assis, a quality analyst at representing affected workers in severance negotiations. “We still want to prove our point, so that Meta is aware of what's going on.”
