Contractors Chant as Meta-Linked Layoffs Hit Dublin

contractors protest – Contract workers employed by Covalen protested planned layoffs outside Meta’s European headquarters in Dublin, arguing they helped train AI systems yet face severance they call inadequate—especially workers with less than two years on the job.

On a bright Friday afternoon in Dublin, a group of contract workers gathered outside Meta’s European headquarters with flags, signs, whistles and vuvuzelas. The noise wasn’t decoration. It was part of the message.

“ We trained the bots. We did the grind. Now we’re being left behind,” they chanted as they protested a planned round of layoffs.

The workers are employed by Dublin-based company Covalen, which provides content moderation and data labeling services used to help Meta fine-tune its AI products. In April, Covalen told 700 employees their jobs were at risk, citing “reduced demand.”

For many of those employees, the fight is now over what comes next.

A large swath of the affected workers won’t receive any severance because they’ve been employed for less than two years. The rest are being offered the minimum payout required under local labor laws—two weeks’ pay for every year of employment—according to the Communications Workers’ Union (CWU). whose members include Covalen employees.

“We’re just getting the crumbs here,” Aadel Obaid, a team manager at Covalen who is part of the planned layoffs, told WIRED. “Give us a little bit of the pie.”

The workers voted to strike outside Covalen’s corporate headquarters before marching to Meta’s nearby campus. trying to force a revision of the severance terms. John Bohan. an organizer at the CWU. said Meta could use its leverage as an anchor client to pressure Covalen into offering an enhanced severance package.

The demand is straightforward: the workers are asking for double what’s currently being offered, and at least some form of payment for workers who do not meet the two-year threshold.

They’re also pressing another issue. Bohan said the company could release Covalen workers from a “cooldown period” that prevents them from working on another Meta account for six months after being laid off. Bohan said Meta previously described the cooldown period to WIRED as an industry standard.

At 1 pm local time on Friday. the strike began with a wall of sound outside Covalen’s red-brick corporate headquarters on an otherwise largely residential street in central Dublin. Workers beat drums, booed, whistled, shouted and catcalled. A security guard watched from inside the lobby with hands on his hips, looking on bemused.

Two hours later, more than 150 protesters started a march down the center of the mile-long stretch of road toward Meta’s campus, slowing traffic to a crawl. Some Dubliners stopped to stare; some applauded.

When the group reached Meta’s complex, two security guards blocked the way with crossed arms. The workers set up at the gates and launched another round of chants: “We scrub the feed. We take the pain. Meta profits from our strain.”

The protest landed on a tense link between modern AI work and the people who do the unglamorous labor behind it: data labeling and content moderation. In Dublin, that link played out in real time as workers argued that the severity of the cuts should not be matched by the size of the payout.

Meta Covalen Dublin layoffs contractors content moderation data labeling AI training severance CWU labor laws cooldown period European headquarters