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“We taught a bots. We did the grinding. Now we are being left,” they said in a news conference from the Metro offices in Dublin, Ireland, yesterday.
The staff are employed by the Dublin-based company Covalen, which operates content control and data logging services that help Meta improve its AI products. In April, Covalen told 700 employees that their jobs were at risk, citing “decreased demand,” WIRED. report.
Most of the affected workers will not be made redundant as they have been on the job for at least two years. The rest are being paid the minimum wage required by local labor laws—two weeks’ pay for every year of work—according to the Communications Workers’ Union (CWU), whose members include Covalen workers.
“We’re just picking up the crumbs here,” Aadel Obaid, a team manager at Covalen who is part of the planning process, told WIRED. “Give us some of the bread.”
Photo: Joel Khalili
In an effort to force Covalen to revise its layoff plan, workers voted to strike outside the company’s office, before marching to Meta’s nearby European headquarters. According to John Bohan, organizer of the CWU, Meta could use its position as a persistent customer to force Covalen to offer its workers an additional severance package. The workers are asking for double the current offer – and other ways to pay workers who don’t meet the two-year limit.
The company may also release Covalen employees from a “cooling period” that prevents them from working on another Meta account for six months after they are fired, Bohan says. (Meta previously reported cooling time to WIRED as an industry standard.)
At 1PM local time on Friday, the workers who worked on the project began to gather outside the headquarters of the Covalen company, a building built of red bricks on a street in the heart of Dublin. The demonstration began with a barrage of noise: the workers beat drums, chanted, whistled, shouted, and cried. Then came the call and response led by an attendant with a megaphone. The housekeeper watched, muttering in the lobby, hands on hips.
Two hours later, the group—now numbering more than 150 people—began to march down the one-kilometer-long road leading to the Meta camp, slowing the traffic to a crawl. The people of Dublin, rejoicing in the early summer, stopped crying; others applauded. When the protesters arrived at the Meta square, two security guards stood cross-legged, blocking the way. The group reached the gates and began another song: “We wash the food. We feel the pain.”
