Protesters on Thursday urged Meta Platforms Inc. to call its Silicon Valley-based engineers and other employees back to the office, after Facebook’s parent company continued to dismiss service workers with “mass layoffs” of shuttle-bus drivers. Drivers and their union supporters rallied in front of Meta’s
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headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif., on Thursday, after more than 160 shuttle drivers and their supervisors lost their jobs. The layoffs amount to about a third of the driver workforce at Meta, according to the drivers’ union.
“This is mass layoffs across the board for Meta,” said Stacy Murphy of Teamsters Local 853. She added that other companies have made some cuts, “but nothing like what we are seeing at Meta.” “These hybrid shifts are hurting good union jobs,” she said. Asked what percentage of its employees are regularly going into the office, a Meta spokeswoman said this week that “75% of teams are working across multiple locations,” though she wouldn’t share more specific information by location or number of days in the office. The spokeswoman added: “Since returning to office, we’ve adjusted on-site services and amenities, including transportation, to better reflect the needs of our hybrid workforce.” If three-fourths of the Meta workforce is going into the office, the many empty spaces in the parking lot of the main campus of the company’s headquarters did not reflect that Thursday. And that number would be much higher than what appears to be happening in the region as a whole. According to the Bay Area Council, which has …