A cohort of 26 Meta employees has instituted legal proceedings against the corporation, alleging that it deployed artificial intelligence systems to determine redundancies, thereby disproportionately singling out individuals on medical, parental, or family leave.

These individuals constitute part of the 8,000 employees—approximately 10% of its workforce—that Meta announced it would terminate in May.

The complaint, submitted late Monday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California in Oakland, alleges that the corporation employed internal artificial intelligence systems, keystroke and activity-monitoring data, dashboards tracking AI token usage, and algorithmically assisted performance evaluations, among other methodologies, to ascertain which personnel would be dismissed.

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."

According to the complaint, 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."

Consequently, the lawsuit contends that individuals availing themselves of protected medical or family leave were disproportionately selected for redundancy.

All 26 anonymous plaintiffs in the action had availed themselves of such leave, or had solicited or been granted reasonable accommodation for a disability.

Although apprised of their impending redundancies, these 26 individuals remain in Meta’s employ, with their terminations scheduled to commence on July 22.

Among the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, a considerable number had taken pregnancy or parental leave, during which they were necessarily absent from work, thereby attenuating their measurable output.

Others had availed themselves of medical leave — one employee disclosed a “serious health condition and disability” that had been validated by Meta’s own provider.

Nonetheless, according to the lawsuit, he was “discouraged and deterred from taking that leave by a manager” who cautioned that doing so would inexorably result in his selection for the impending redundancies.

Furthermore, the lawsuit asserts that Meta proffered no accommodation for his disability.

Meta asserted in a statement that the allegations are "devoid of merit and unsupported by factual evidence.

Workforce management and organisational decisions were, and continue to be, determined by human personnel, not artificial intelligence."

Approximately half of the plaintiffs had availed themselves of leave for caregiving or pregnancy-related purposes.

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, subsequently followed by bereavement leave.

The complaint alleges that the dismissals contravened multiple federal and state 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 additionally invokes the doctrine of “disparate impact liability,” a long-established civil rights principle that the administration of President Donald Trump sought to jettison.

Disparate impact, enshrined in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, posits that ostensibly neutral policies or practices may be deemed discriminatory if they disproportionately disadvantage a protected class of workers and are not demonstrably essential to the performance of the role.

The Trump administration has directed federal agencies to deprioritize enforcement of disparate impact liability, contending that its application undermines “meritocracy” and fosters the presumption that any racial or gender disparity within a workforce is attributable to discrimination.

This directive has prompted the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to abandon discrimination cases on behalf of certain workers.

The lawsuit against Meta underscores that corporations remain susceptible to disparate impact litigation in the era of artificial intelligence, notwithstanding the Trump administration's efforts to curtail its enforcement.

Workers retain the autonomy to pursue such claims independently should the EEOC dismiss their complaints, and several state statutes explicitly prohibit disparate impact discrimination.

In the litigation against Meta, counsel for the plaintiffs contended that the corporation’s “algorithmically assisted selection process, by systematically recording such absences as reduced performance, falls more heavily on women than on men.”

This disproportionate impact arises, the attorneys argued, because women are statistically more likely to take pregnancy and caregiving leave.

The lawsuit invokes Title VII’s proscription of employment practices that produce a disparate impact, alongside a seminal 1971 Supreme Court ruling that enshrined this legal doctrine.

The plaintiffs’ legal representatives articulated in a statement that the litigation seeks a singular objective: the preservation of the status quo to ensure the continued employment of the workers pending arbitration.

This is predicated on the fact that “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 coverage of women in the workforce by reporters is financially supported by Pivotal Ventures.

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