Meta sued over AI-led layoffs targeting staff on medical and parental leave

Sanfrancisco,UPDATED: Jul 15, 2026 12:54 IST

A group of 26 Meta employees has sued the company in the US, alleging that it used artificial intelligence-based systems to decide layoffs in a way that disproportionately affected staff who were on medical, parental or family leave. The employees said the process unfairly counted reduced output during protected leave against them.

The lawsuit, filed late Monday in federal court in Oakland, California, challenges the layoffs Meta announced in May, when it said it would cut about 8,000 jobs, or around 10 per cent of its workforce. Meta has denied the claims, saying they "lack merit and are not based on facts" and that workforce and organisational decisions "were and are made by people, not AI".

According to the complaint, 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 said 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 employees further alleged that Meta did not make allowances for protected leave while considering these scores and "did not pause the system for the individualised, leave- and accommodation-neutral review that the law requires". As a result, the suit said, workers on protected medical or family leave were disproportionately selected for layoffs.

All 26 employees in the lawsuit are anonymous. The complaint said each of them took protected leave and requested or received a reasonable accommodation for disability. Although they have been told they are being laid off, all 26 are still employed by Meta, with separations due to begin on July 22.

The lawsuit said many of the employees had taken pregnancy or parental leave, during which they would not have been working and their measured output would therefore have been lower. Others had taken medical leave. One employee, the suit said, disclosed a "serious health condition and disability" that was approved by Meta's own provider, but was "discouraged and deterred from taking that leave by a manager" who warned that doing so would lead to his selection in the expected layoffs. The complaint also alleged that Meta offered no accommodation for his disability.

About half of the plaintiffs had taken leave for caregiving or pregnancy-related reasons. Of them, 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 took bereavement leave.

The employees said 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. The complaint also cited "disparate impact liability", under which a policy that appears neutral can still be discriminatory if it places a heavier burden on a protected group and is not necessary for the job.

The lawsuit referred to moves by President Donald Trump's administration to step back from enforcing disparate impact liability. It said federal agencies had been ordered to give lower priority to such enforcement, and that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission had dropped discrimination cases on behalf of some workers. Even so, the complaint said workers can still bring such cases on their own if the EEOC rejects their complaints, and that several state laws specifically bar disparate impact discrimination.

In the case 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" because women disproportionately take pregnancy and caregiving leave. They said the lawsuit seeks to preserve the status quo and keep the workers employed pending arbitration, arguing that "once these separations are final, the harms are irreversible: employer-subsidised health coverage lost during pregnancy, postpartum recovery, and active medical treatment; time-bound leave rights extinguished; unvested equity forfeited; and immigration consequences triggered". Overall, the case centres on whether the methods used in Meta's layoffs unfairly penalised employees who were on protected leave or needed disability accommodations.

With PTI Inputs

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