A group of 26 Meta employees has sued the company, claiming it used artificial intelligence systems to select people for layoffs, disproportionately targeting those on medical, parental or family leave. The lawsuit filed in federal court in Oakland, California, claims the company used internal AI systems, keystroke and activity-monitoring data, AI token-usage dashboards and algorithmically assisted performance rankings to determine who would be laid off.

Protected Leave and Algorithmic Bias

Many of these scores and ratings “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 lawsuit says. Meta, according to the lawsuit, did not account for protected leave when taking employees’ scores into account and “did not pause the system for the individualized, leave- and accommodation-neutral review that the law requires.”

About half the plaintiffs had taken leave for caregiving or pregnancy-related reasons. Eight are women who had taken maternity or pregnancy-related leave, four are men who had taken parental leave and one is a woman who had taken leave to care for a family member and later bereavement leave. The lawsuit says the layoffs violated several 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.

Disparate Impact Liability

The complaint also references “disparate impact liability,” a longstanding civil rights concept that holds that facially neutral policies or practices can be discriminatory if they disproportionately burden a protected class of workers and aren’t necessary for the job. The lawsuit against Meta underscores that companies remain vulnerable to disparate impact litigation in the age of AI.

Original reporting: KTBS 3 (Shreveport) — read the source article.