26 current and former Meta employees just filed a lawsuit that raises a question I don't have a clean answer to.
The Meta AI scoring lawsuit and the question it raises for anyone using dashboards to make workforce decisions.
26 current and former Meta employees just filed a lawsuit that raises a question I don’t have a clean answer to.
The lawsuit alleges Meta used AI productivity scoring, things like token usage, keystrokes, and communications monitoring, to help decide who got cut in a round of mass layoffs. It also alleges the cuts disproportionately hit employees with medical conditions or on leave.
Executives love dashboards. Call volume, quote turnaround, order accuracy, the kind of numbers that tell you who is carrying weight and who isn’t. As Gino Wickman writes in his book Traction, “Everyone has a number—even his receptionist. Hers was two, as in, ‘two rings good, three rings bad.’”
Those numbers are useful right up until the day someone uses them to decide who keeps their job, and then the question changes. Did the metric measure the work, or did it measure something else entirely, like who happened to be out sick or on leave when the data was pulled?
I don’t know where Meta’s dashboards crossed that line, or if a court will find that they did. What I keep coming back to is that most of us are already collecting some version of that same data, on a smaller scale, and most of us have not asked the question yet.