Meta (Fb, Instagram giant) has opened negotiations in recent days for a voluntary exit plan which risks canceling a third of its presence in France. In fact, the Menlo Park branch, which today has around 300 employees in the country, presented the proposal to the workers’ representatives for a rupture conventionnelle collective (RCC) aimed at cutting approximately 100 positions.
What Meta offers
The French manoeuvre, whose preliminary applications have been collected until 5 November, provides for an exit package above the sector averages: an indemnity equal to 2.15 months’ salary for each year of service provided in the company; up to 10 months of mobility leave covered at 80% of the gross salary and a budget for professional retraining or stimulation of self-entrepreneurship. If the agreement is formalized by the transalpine administration, the Paris office will see its workforce almost halved compared to the 358 employees registered at the beginning of 2024, when a first round of “guided” farewells had already caused 88 resources to leave.
The monstrous capital investments
Unlike the individual buyout plans chosen by Microsoft – which has opened a voluntary exit window for around 60,000 eligible people up to internal level 70 (high-end executives) across the USA, Canada, UK and India – or Google – which has extended the use of incentivized resignations to five countries (with ceilings of up to 12 months’ salary in Switzerland) -, Meta must pass through the constraints of transalpine trade union and ministerial scrutiny. However, the drive to reorganize the workforce remains common to the entire sector.
The reduction in local workforce responds directly to the pressure on budgets exerted by the race for artificial intelligence. Meta has revised its capital expenditure (CapEx) estimate for the current year to between 135 and 145 billion dollars, resources destined almost entirely to the procurement of high-performance processors and the construction of proprietary data centers (without forgetting the energy supply necessary for supercomputers).
Reposition yourself on the work of AI
And it’s not just a question of cuts. The integration of Ai’s internal agent-based tools is also accelerating the reorganization of corporate tasks. After eliminating around 8 thousand positions globally and reallocating another 7 thousand resources to divisions focused on the development of artificial intelligence, the management led by Mark Zuckerberg is betting on automation to allow numerically leaner teams to maintain the productivity of divisions that were previously much larger.