Every worker should be warned about Covalen, a subsidiary of CPL Recruitment. One recent Monday morning, the company said that the jobs of 720 workers were at risk. This came via a brief video announcement, and no questions were allowed. The workers were treated like disposable hankies.
Covalen will pick and choose who to sack, but it is already clear that most of the AI department will go. This comprises about 507 workers.
For over a year, they have been training Llama, a large language model developed by Meta. ‘Training’ does not reveal what is really involved. Covalen is a content moderator, which means its workers clean up the filth that appears on social media.
The new AI models must learn how to spot paedophilia or suicide ideation. The only way it can do that is if workers mimic these actors. So individual workers must, for example, assume the role of a paedophile and ask, ‘What present will I get for my 12-year-old daughter?’ They teach the machine the various tricks used to bypass guardrails.
The only reward that workers received for this horrific work was the sack. They were literally training machines to replace them.
Covalen makes a lot of money from its contract with Mera, and no doubt its founder, Anne Heraghty, has become a wealthy woman. But its workforce is treated abysmally. They are paid an average of €31,000 a year, even though other contractors pay more. Crucially, the company only pays the statutory redundancy, which workers are entitled to after two years.
But there is a catch. The AI department is new, and so many workers do not have two years of service. Many are migrant workers, as different languages are used on social media. (There are very few Irish people who can speak Bahasa Indonesia!) Sometimes workers hope to get three years of service so that they can get a Stamp 4, which allows them to work here without an employment permit.
Sacking, therefore, does not just mean losing a job with no redundancy payment– it can also mean expulsion from Ireland.
Covalen insists that there must be a six-month delay before you can be employed by another Meta contractor. In other words, the skills that workers build up cannot be transferred to a ‘competitor’. This is the standard game played by a multinational like Meta. They outsource work to external companies and then put them in competition with one another, so there is constant pressure to reduce workers’ standards.
AI will not really be able to replace human beings. Even at the level of content management, nevermind when it comes to more complex questions, the AI will not perform as well as humans.
However, there are also far deeper problems. A report from the National Social and Economic Council states that “63 per cent of Irish employment lies in highly AI-exposed occupations”. Covalen might therefore only be the start.
In 1974, Harry Braverman, a former printer, published a brilliant book, Labour and Monopoly Capital, which described management techniques. They aim to make explicit the implicit skills of workers. A plumber or a content management worker, for example, seems to know instinctively what to do. Management, however, tries to force them to write down procedures so it can assess their skills. Then they break the job into tiny parts to de-skill workers. Finally, they try to turn workers into unthinking automatons who do what they are told.
Braverman never knew that management would transfer the skills to machines called ‘artificial intelligence’. That they would store away their skills to be exploited forever.
The other problem with AI is that it has big environmental effects because it relies on huge data centres. In Ireland, they will shortly use 30% of electricity and get it at a lower price than domestic users. Globally, AI-related infrastructure will soon consume six times more water than Denmark, a country of 6 million. The microchips that power AI need earth minerals, which are mined in harmful ways. They create electronic waste, such as mercury and lead.
Nothing better exposes capitalism than the race underway between the US and Chinese corporations to win supremacy in AI. Both regard it as the killer punch that will ensure dominance in the future. As a result, spending on AI is projected to reach $2.5 trillion in 2026, surpassing the largest scientific and infrastructure projects. A fraction of that figure could be used to eliminate world hunger, which has grown since Trump blockaded the Strait of Hormuz.
Worse, the rich are running like lemmings to invest in AI, no matter what is happening in the global economy or even without knowing there will be a sufficient ‘return’ on their investment. The US stock market is booming, mainly led by investments in the tech sector. Moreover, nearly 20% of the equities are held outside the US. Capitalism increasingly rests on a gamble that AI will bring wealth to the few.
There are some reasons to doubt this. First, the sheer level of capital investment means they must gain a high rate of profit, and so they will try to reduce labour costs. While early winners might gain, over the longer run, there can be a decline. Second, there is no guarantee that AI will produce the revenue streams that investors need. Microsoft revealed that only 3% of its paying customers will pay for Copilot, its productivity tool. Third, a cheaper version such as DeepSeek can lead to ‘stranded’ investments, which potential customers desert.
All of which raises concerns about Irish capitalism. It has become reliant on US investment by forging a special tax haven. Increasingly, they are dependent on the tech industry – more so than computers, medical devices or even big pharma. The government made this reckoning without Trump’s tariffs and his constant war mongering. They also did not predict the impact of AI, which is particularly successful in eliminating jobs in computer coding.
In the meantime, we should get behind the Covalen workers. Shockingly, a company which pays lavishly for its own legal representatives deny workers the right to choose who will represent them. Covalen workers are demanding to negotiate with their union. They want redundancy payments that are up to the standard already set in the tech industry. They want the removal of the six-month restriction clause.
We should back them fully.
