In the past, joining a union after you had signed a contract of employment with a big tech company was rarely, if ever, an automatic reflex.
The idea must have felt faintly old-fashioned, irrelevant even. These were places where in-office perks were framed as a form of care – while handily doubling as a mode of entrenching people at work; if you didn’t need to pick up your dry-cleaning, you could stay longer, or so the thinking went. Salaries were high and company loyalty was tribal. Employee resource groups, often structured around workers’ identities, were all about “building community” in-house. Who needs a union?
But this is going to change. It will have to change, because lay-offs rather than job growth are now the sector’s reality.
Last week’s headline figure of 350 people losing their jobs at Meta in Dublin is notable for a number of reasons. For one, it’s around 20 per cent of Meta’s staff here, double the overall percentage Meta is shedding globally. This may indicate that Meta jobs in Ireland are more vulnerable than Meta jobs elsewhere, or that Meta over-hired in Ireland. Either way, it’s a problem.
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The other reason it’s notable is because it’s not the real figure. The real figure of recent Irish Meta job losses is around 1,070. The other 720 redundancies are at Covalen, a Meta contractor operating a large content moderation site in Sandyford in Dublin. Unlike workers directly employed by Meta, these moderators, who do extremely challenging work, are mostly low-paid, and do not benefit from big tech perks. Covalen already cut more than 300 jobs earlier this year.
What some Covalen workers have going for them is a union. The Communication Workers’ Union (CWU) is fighting for moderators’ rights. Last year, it won a concession for migrant content moderators at Covalen in a dispute around a delay in the company issuing documentation that allowed them to renew their work visas. Now, hundreds of moderators will not receive severance pay because they have been at the company for less than two years. Content moderation work has an infamously high turnover; the work is gruelling, and generally badly paid. Many at Covalen are on €32,000 a year. The CWU has accused Covalen of rushing the redundancy consultation process, pushing the number of workers who will receive no redundancy pay from 400 to 460.
On Friday, May 15th, members of the CWU at Covalen began the first of a series of one-day strikes. Back in January, workers held more strikes demanding Covalen recognise the union. Without organising, and without union support, bargaining power is challenging. But tech workers are going to need it.
The impact of thousands of people losing their jobs in tech in Ireland is not just an issue causing personal stress to workers. Nor is it merely an alarm bell for a State that has rooted its exchequer’s prosperity in the corporate tax take of American companies, although it is both of those.
But it will also have a knock-on effect on Dublin city. Who will corporate landlords rent their luxury apartments to when a chunk of people on decent pay lose their jobs and hit the road for Lisbon, Barcelona or Berlin? What will hospitality businesses reliant on corporate spend as part of their revenue do if the job losses continue?
Companies shed jobs for all sorts of reasons. But what used to look like growth is different now. One new metric is how few human workers you need as AI accelerates, because that proves the technology’s worth, especially when you’re making it. There is also something of a correction following the pandemic-era hiring splurges. Overall, Meta has reduced its Irish workforce by 40 per cent since the pandemic, a reduction that coincided with the company opening a large office in Ballsbridge in Dublin 4, and almost immediately moving to try and sublet half of it.
Then there is the energy-guzzling elephant in the room that will continue to accelerate job losses. The amount invested in data centre buildouts is becoming barely fathomable, so something has to give. The AI technology these data centres provide the infrastructure for also accelerates white-collar job losses.
Ireland’s data centres are still conventional cloud. We cannot facilitate hyperscale AI data centres because their power demands are so huge, our energy infrastructure would likely collapse.
Irish governments have spent a decade spinning a line that data centres anchor tech employment in Ireland. And yet, Dublin is a global data centre capital, but tech jobs are going. If there is a Government politician who can square that circle, I’m all ears.
Mark Zuckerberg has indicated Meta plans to spend up to $145 billion (€124.9 billion) on AI in 2026. One of its data centre plans in Louisiana is reportedly a $200 billion project. Meta’s 2025 net income was $60 billion. So how does that work?
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Meta uses Special Purpose Vehicles also known as SPEs. Another well-known company made SPEs quite famous – it was called Enron. Meta uses SPEs as a legitimate part of its financing structure to keep the debt off its balance sheet, but Enron abused them, using SPEs to hide debt.
Meta can’t fund data centres alone, which is why it cuts deals to maintain operational control of data centres, while investment management companies finance the projects with a lot of debt.
At the heart of this era of great change are workers. Tech companies are demonstrating AI’s prowess by shifting workers internally to AI projects. In turn, AI will reduce the number of employees. And the data centre spend has to come from somewhere.
A union cannot turn this trajectory around. It can, however, work to fight for the rights of tech workers as their jobs are shed in the name of progress, and because when big spending is happening, it has to be offset somewhere. Tech workers will increasingly need someone in their corner, and AI can’t do that kind of organising.
