Irish Examiner view: Worrying times for tech workers

Tech sector

Layoffs are expected in Facebook parent company Meta's headquarters in Dublin. Picture: Brian Lawless/PA Wire

The bad news continues for tech companies with job losses announced yesterday at one of the big beasts in the sector.

Meta, the parent company of Facebook and WhatAapp, announced 11,000 job losses worldwide, reducing its overall workforce by about 13%. That means just under 400 Irish Meta employees will lose their jobs.

There’s an uncomfortable familiarity to the sequence in which these job losses in tech now occur — the total is leaked ahead of time, there’s a vaguely regretful statement from the company owner — or not, in the case of Elon Musk and Twitter — and the employees are moved on and out.

It has been noted by some observers that these latest layoffs come in the contest of recent rapid growth, and that many of those now losing their jobs are well equipped to find new work in the digital economy. This does not in any way soften the blow for those workers, of course, particularly with Christmas on the horizon.

In considering those redundancies it was interesting to see the comments from Tánaiste Leo Varadkar that the Government had received “absolute assurance from the company that all the legal processes will be respected”.

While this should provide some reassurance to Meta employees, it also raises an obvious question: Why does the Government need to receive those assurances in the first place?

It is accepted that many tech companies are strongly opposed to their workers organising themselves into unions in the first place, and we are now seeing the unfortunate consequence of workers who don’t have union representation: Their only recourse is the hope the Government will hold their employers to their obligations.

This should not come as a surprise. Two years ago, the European Trade Union Confederation complained to Facebook bosses that its ‘Facebook Workplace’ software was allowing moderators to censor words such as ‘unionise’.

Hence the attention being paid by ministers to the current situation in Meta: No one else is in a position to help those workers if the company decides not to follow the legal processes mentioned above.