A group of 26 Meta employees has initiated legal proceedings against the company, alleging that it deployed artificial intelligence systems to determine which staff members would be made redundant, disproportionately affecting those on medical, parental, or family leave.

These 8,000 employees, representing about 10% of Meta's workforce, are those the company said it would lay off in May.

The lawsuit, filed late Monday in federal court in Oakland, California, claims that Meta used internal AI systems, keystroke and activity-monitoring data, AI token-usage dashboards, and algorithmically assisted performance rankings, among other methods, to decide who would be laid off.

The lawsuit contends that many of these scores and ratings are, "by design, cannot be accumulated by an employee who is on protected medical or family leave, or whose output is reduced by a disability."

It further alleges that Meta failed to account for protected leave when evaluating employees' scores and "did not pause the system for the individualized, leave- and accommodation-neutral review that the law requires."

According to the lawsuit, employees on protected medical or family leave were disproportionately selected for redundancy.

All 26 anonymous plaintiffs had taken protected leave or had requested or received reasonable accommodation for a disability.

Although they have been informed of their dismissal, all 26 remain employed by Meta, with their termination scheduled to commence on July 22.

Many of the employees involved in the lawsuit had taken pregnancy or parental leave, during which they were absent from work and consequently saw a reduction in their measured output.

Others took medical leave — one individual disclosed a “serious health condition and disability” that had been approved by Meta’s own provider.

However, 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 layoffs.

The lawsuit further states that Meta offered no accommodation for his disability.

Meta asserted in a statement that the allegations "lack merit and are not grounded in fact.

Workforce management and organizational decisions were and continue to be made by humans, not AI."

Approximately half of the plaintiffs had taken leave for caregiving or pregnancy-related reasons.

Among them, 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, followed by bereavement leave.

The lawsuit alleges that the layoffs contravened multiple state and federal statutes, specifically the Family and Medical Leave Act, the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, and the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act.

The complaint also references “disparate impact liability,” a long-established civil rights principle that the Trump administration sought to abandon.

Disparate impact, as codified in Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, stipulates that policies or practices which appear neutral on their face may still be deemed discriminatory if they disproportionately disadvantage a protected class of workers and are not essential for the role.

The Trump administration has directed federal agencies to reduce the priority of enforcing disparate impact liability, contending that its use undermines 'meritocracy' and fosters the assumption that any racial or gender imbalance in a workforce stems from discrimination.

This directive has led the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to drop discrimination cases on behalf of some workers.

Nonetheless, the lawsuit against Meta highlights that companies remain exposed to disparate impact litigation in the AI era, despite the Trump administration's efforts to curb its enforcement.

Workers can still pursue such lawsuits independently if the EEOC rejects their complaints, and several state laws explicitly ban disparate impact discrimination.

In the lawsuit against Meta, the plaintiffs' lawyers 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.”

This, they claimed, is because women disproportionately take leave for pregnancy and caregiving.

The lawsuit cites Title VII's ban on employment practices that have a disparate impact, as well as a landmark 1971 Supreme Court ruling that recognized this doctrine.

The plaintiffs' legal representatives stated in a press release that the lawsuit pursues a single objective: preserving the current conditions to keep the workers employed while arbitration is pending.

This is necessary because "once these separations are final, the harms are irreversible: employer-subsidized health coverage lost during pregnancy, postpartum recovery, and active medical treatment; time-bound leave rights extinguished; unvested equity forfeited; and immigration consequences triggered."

The reporting on women in the workforce is financially supported by Pivotal Ventures.

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