Meta nondisclosure layoff pacts violated law, judge rules
Facebook owner Meta unlawfully forced more than 7,000 former employees to sign confidentiality agreements in order to receive severance payments, a National Labor Relations Board judge found.
NLRB Judge Andrew Gollin issued a decision saying the confidentiality and non-disparagement agreements signed in 2022 were too broad and could crimp worker’s right to organize under federal labor law.
Gollin’s decision retroactively applies the terms of an NLRB decision from February 2023 finding companies cannot require employees to sign severance agreements that waive their rights under the National Labor Relations Act.
The decision also requires Meta to stop offering similar agreements going forward that ban “making any disparaging, critical or otherwise detrimental comments to any person or entity concerning the Company’s products, services or programs” or otherwise generally saying anything negative about the company or even talking about the terms of the agreements.
Meta did not respond to an emailed request for comment, and it was not immediately clear if the company planned to appeal. Though it, SpaceX and other companies have fired back in court, arguing that agencies including the NLRB are unconstitutional.
Meta, which operates Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, orchestrated tens of thousands of layoffs during parts of 2022 and 2023, part of what CEO Mark Zuckerberg called “Meta’s year of efficiency”
Google, Amazon, Salesforce and many other tech companies large and small also had significant post-pandemic job cuts after aggressive hiring sprees during the shift to remote work in the early days of the pandemic.
Vox reported earlier this year that ChatGPT maker OpenAI has also come under fire for enforcing broad agreements written to silence former employees from talking about the company, threatening to claw back equity and enforce other penalties if they do so much as say that such agreements exist.
CEO Sam Altman apologized and professed some ignorance of the practice, although Vox’s reporting appeared to show he and other senior figures at the company were aware of the agreements.