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“We have trained Robots. We did the grinding. Waving flags, holding signs and armed with whistles and horns, a crowd of contract workers gathered outside Meta’s offices in Dublin, Ireland, on Friday afternoon cheered.
The workers are employed by Dublin-based Covalen, which is handling the matter Moderation in content and data classification services that help Meta improve its AI products. In April, Kovalin told 700 employees that their jobs were at risk, citing “low demand,” WIRED reported. I mentioned.
A large group of affected workers will not receive any severance pay because they have worked for less than two years. The rest are given the minimum compensation required under local labor laws — two weeks’ pay for each year of work — according to the Communications Workers Union (CWU), whose members include Covalen employees.
“We’re only getting crumbs here,” Adel Obaid, a team manager at Covalen who is involved in the planned layoffs, tells WIRED. “Give us a little pie.”
Photography: Joel Khalili
In an attempt to force Kovalin to review its severance package, workers voted to strike outside the company’s office, before marching to Meta’s nearby European headquarters. According to John Bohan, a CWU organizer, Meta could use its influence as a major client to pressure Covalen to offer an enhanced severance package to its employees. The workers are demanding twice what is currently offered, and at least some form of payment for workers who do not meet the two-year threshold.
Bohan says the company can also exempt Covalen workers from a “cooling-off period” that prevents them from working on another Meta account for six months after they are laid off. (Mita previously described the cool-down period to WIRED as an industry standard.)
At 1pm local time on Friday, striking workers began gathering outside Kovalin’s headquarters, a red brick office building on a largely residential street in the heart of Dublin. The protests began with a wall of sound: workers beat drums, booed, whistled, shouted, and chanted. Then came a barrage of call-and-response chants, led by a loudspeaker operator. The building’s security guard watched from inside the lobby, confused, his hands on his hips.
Two hours later, the group — now numbering more than 150 people — began walking down the middle of the mile-long stretch of road to the Meta campus, slowing traffic to a crawl. Dubliners enjoying the start of summer pause to reflect; Some clapped. When the protesters arrived at the Meta Complex, two security guards stood with crossed arms, blocking the road. The group lined up at the gates and another round of chants began: “We clean up the food. We take the pain. The profits from our breed.”
