A COHORT OF employees have informed the outsourcing firm Covalen that they intend to carry out industrial action following a row over job classification. 

Personnel working as legal compliance operations staff will carry out a full day of strike action next Wednesday, with a picket line in operation for the entire duration of the morning and evening shifts they carry out. 

The Communications Workers’ Union (CWU) is representing workers in the dispute. 

Covalen provides staff who work on various Meta (Facebook, etc) projects, who work in Meta’s offices.

A group of around 70 staff members are arguing that they are doing legal compliance work for Meta, even though they are contracted as ‘community operations analysts’ or ‘AI annotators’. 

The difference matters, they say, because Covalen operates a salary guide for legal operations workers. 

Legal operations staff on Meta projects carry out “highly specialised work” including handling legal disputes the social media firm is dealing with in other jurisdictions. They review sensitive legal files, which require careful interpretation and risk assessment. 

A salary document outlining benchmarks from the outsourcing firm shows that Legal Ops staff should be paid at least €32,000, and €42,000 for mid-range employees, while high earners under the role get €55,000. 

Meanwhile community operations analysts get a minimum of €29,700, €32,000 in the mid-range, and €35,000 for high earners. 

The group of workers at Covalen surveyed their cohort on what work duties they carry out and delivered the results to management to demonstrate that they should be on the higher salary scale.

They say that they did not get a response and delivered a petition to the company. 

The decision to carry out strike action comes as workers feel they have exhausted other avenues towards accelerating a salary review process. 

The action is a significant step. Even though the 2,500 strong workforce has recently become increasingly unionised, in general workers on tech projects for a big multi-national companies based in Dublin have not taken industrial action. 

In communications with staff Covalen has attempted to assure them that the company is not “willfully misclassifying” their roles. 

In a response to the strike notice delivered to them, management said that while these workers at times carry out work on legal compliance it is work that does not require a legal qualification. 

The workers insist they are carrying out the same function as their better paid counterparts. 

It comes as staff have been informed that 420 roles at the firm are at risk chiefly on AI-related projects.

Staff have taken issue with the terms of redundancy the company has outlined, and are seeking further consultation with the firm. 

In particular they are taking issue with the fact that Covalen, which works almost exclusively for Meta, the Facebook parent company, is continuing to hire people into the roles they are laying off, including AI annotator roles. 

The Journal has asked Covalen for a statement.