“We trained the bots. We did the grind. Now we’re being left behind,” chanted a horde of contract workers who gathered outside Meta’s offices in Dublin, Ireland, on Friday afternoon. Waving flags, brandishing signs, and armed with whistles and vuvuzelas, they were out to protest a round of planned layoffs. The workers are employed by Dublin-based company Covalen, which handles content moderation and data labeling services that help Meta to fine-tune its AI products. In April, Covalen told 700 employees that their jobs were at risk, citing “reduced demand,” WIRED reported. 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, tells WIRED. “Give us a little bit of the pie.” To try to compel Covalen into revising the severance package, workers voted to strike outside the company’s corporate office, before marching to Meta’s nearby European headquarters. According to John Bohan, an organizer at the CWU, Meta could use its leverage as an anchor client to pressure Covalen into offering its employees an enhanced severance package. The workers are asking for double what’s currently being offered—and at least some form of payment for workers who don’t meet the two-year threshold. The company could also release Covalen workers from a “cooldown period” preventing them from working on another Meta account for six months after being laid off, Bohan says. (Meta previously described the cooldown period to WIRED as an industry standard.) At 1 pm local time on Friday, the striking workers began to gather outside Covalen’s corporate headquarters, a red-brick office building on an otherwis