Twenty-six Meta employees have taken the social media giant to court, alleging the company relied on artificial intelligence tools to choose which workers would lose their jobs — and that the process unfairly targeted people who had taken medical, parental, or family leave.
The workers are part of the approximately 8,000 employees — roughly 10% of Meta’s total workforce — that the company announced would be laid off in May. Their lawsuit, filed late Monday in federal court in Oakland, California, claims Meta used a range of internal AI systems to determine who would be cut. Those tools reportedly included keystroke and activity monitoring, AI usage dashboards, and algorithm-based performance rankings.
According to the lawsuit, many of those performance scores “by design, cannot be accumulated by an employee who is on protected medical or family leave, or whose output is reduced by a disability.” The filing also alleges that Meta “did not pause the system for the individualized, leave- and accommodation-neutral review that the law requires,” meaning workers on protected leave were unfairly penalized in the rankings.
All 26 plaintiffs, who are identified anonymously in the lawsuit, had taken protected leave and either requested or received a disability accommodation. Although they have been notified of their upcoming terminations, all 26 are still employed by Meta, with separations scheduled to begin July 22.
Many of those suing took pregnancy or parental leave, which naturally reduced their measurable work output during that time. Others took medical leave. One plaintiff reportedly had a serious health condition and disability that was approved by Meta’s own provider, but the lawsuit says a manager warned that taking leave would likely result in the employee being selected for layoffs — effectively discouraging the worker from using leave they were entitled to. Meta also allegedly failed to offer that employee any disability accommodation.
Meta pushed back on the allegations, saying in a statement that the claims “lack merit and are not based on facts. Workforce management and organizational decisions were and are made by people, not AI.”
Of the 26 plaintiffs, about half took leave for caregiving or pregnancy-related reasons. 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 and later took bereavement leave.
The lawsuit contends that Meta’s actions violated multiple state and federal laws, including the Family and Medical Leave Act, the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, and the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act.
The case also invokes “disparate impact liability” — a civil rights legal concept that holds that even neutral-seeming workplace policies can be considered discriminatory if they disproportionately harm a protected group of workers and aren’t required for the job. This doctrine is codified in Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
The Trump administration has directed federal agencies to pull back from enforcing disparate impact claims, arguing the concept undermines “meritocracy” and wrongly assumes workplace imbalances are the result of discrimination. As a result, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has dropped some discrimination cases on behalf of workers.
Despite that shift, the Meta lawsuit highlights that companies can still face disparate impact litigation even in the current political climate. Workers retain the right to bring such lawsuits independently if the EEOC declines to pursue their complaints, and a number of state laws continue to prohibit disparate impact discrimination.
Attorneys for the plaintiffs argued that Meta’s algorithm-based selection process “by systematically recording such absences as reduced performance, falls more heavily on women than on men” — citing the fact that women disproportionately take pregnancy and caregiving leave. They also pointed to a landmark 1971 Supreme Court ruling that established the disparate impact doctrine.
The lawyers said the lawsuit has a single immediate goal: keeping the workers employed while the case moves to arbitration. They warned that once the terminations are finalized, “the harms are irreversible,” including the loss of employer-sponsored health coverage during pregnancy or medical treatment, the forfeiture of unvested equity, the elimination of time-sensitive leave rights, and potential immigration consequences.
