The friday 5: livestream rage, embrace AI or else, CEO security

Happy Friday, HR friends! 🙌

A Meta employee did what many of us have quietly imagined: they commandeered a company-wide AI livestream and told a senior executive exactly what they thought of him, in words we definitely can't print here.

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IN TODAY’S EDITION

• 🎤 A Meta employee hijacks a company-wide AI livestream to curse out a senior exec

• ⚠️ Gallup finds tech workers who don't use AI regularly face 3x the layoff risk

• 🔄 BlackRock's 4th round of layoffs in 18 months gets called "ordinary discipline"

• 💃 An Alaska Airlines flight attendant sues for race and sex bias after being fired for a TikTok dance

• 🕶️ Tech CEO security spending is exploding — and the reason why should concern every HR leader

THE FRIDAY 5

🙎 When the workforce is done playing nice

🎤 A Meta employee crashed a company-wide AI livestream, and it did not stay professional for long. During an internal Applied AI division presentation, an employee seized the audio and told organizers to relay a message to a senior Meta AI executive: that he's "a piece of [expletive]." Thousands of colleagues witnessed it live.

The outburst is the most dramatic symptom yet of a workforce in open revolt. Meta reassigned around 6,500 engineers and product managers into its Applied AI division earlier this year, involuntarily. Their new jobs involve creating coding challenges and evaluation tasks for AI models rather than building products. Employees call themselves "draftees" and "conscripts," and one told Wired: "you have zero purpose in life all of a sudden, you barely interact with anyone, you just have these tasks every week."

Meta's CPO Chris Cox acknowledged the strain felt like "running a marathon in the middle of a hailstorm and then, like, your teammate gets replaced and then we're recording you."

🔗 Read more — Yahoo Finance

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⚠️ Tech workers who don't use AI regularly face triple the layoff risk, there's data to back it up. A new Gallup study of more than 23,000 US workers finds the predicted probability of being laid off is about 6% for tech workers who use AI at least monthly, compared to 18% for those who use it less frequently.

AI was the top reason companies cited for job cuts last month, accounting for about 40% of such announcements per outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

Gallup's chief scientist Jim Harter also warns against companies tying performance evaluations to AI usage frequency, it could encourage employees to game the system rather than genuinely improve productivity.

🔗 Read more — Business Standard

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🔄 BlackRock just ran its fourth round of layoffs in under 18 months, and a spokesperson called it "ordinary discipline." The latest cuts affect roughly 200 employees (less than 1% of the firm) across investment, operations, technology, and its private financing arm. The move follows its $12 billion acquisition of HPS Investment Partners and has been framed as streamlining operations to accommodate growth.

The "ordinary" framing has drawn sharp responses from workforce experts. David Grossman, CEO of The Grossman Group, told The HR Digest: "employees do not experience layoffs as ordinary. When cuts happen again and again, the people who remain stay braced, constantly asking, 'Am I next?' That is survival brain as a permanent condition, and survival brain does not do the high-judgment work companies like BlackRock need from the people who remain."

If you are managing repeated restructuring cycles, how you communicate matters as much as what you cut.

🔗 Read more — The HR Digest

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💃 Alaska Airlines fired a flight attendant for a TikTok dance, she finished her training at the top of her class and sued them for it. The employee, an Asian American and African American woman (case: Diala v. Alaska Airlines), was let go days before the end of her probationary period. The video showed her twerking on a grounded plane at Seattle-Tacoma Airport, with no hashtags linking the video to the airline.

Her lawsuit alleges that male flight attendants who posted comparable content faced little to no discipline, and that the airline's "subjective" conduct policies were used to apply different standards based on race and sex.

🔗 Read more — HR Dive

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🕶️ Tech CEOs now spend millions on bodyguards, and the numbers explain why this is becoming an HR and governance issue. A Molotov cocktail was thrown at Sam Altman's San Francisco home in early April. A WiseTech Global CEO received a handwritten threat against his family after announcing job cuts due to AI. These incidents follow the December 2024 murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, and corporate America is responding fast.

In 2021, 23.5% of S&P 500 companies offered security packages to executives; by 2025 that figure hit 39.7%, with the median value of those packages nearly tripling from ~$44,000 to $136,000. Meta spent $22 million protecting Mark Zuckerberg and his family in 2025, more than Google, Apple, Amazon, and Netflix combined.

🔗 Read more — Human Resources Director

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That’s it for today!

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