About 300 jobs look set to be cut at TikTok’s Dublin office, with the video-sharing giant offering termination agreements to employees affected by its restructuring plans.
Last month, 667 jobs at the platform’s Grand Canal Dock office were placed at risk under a proposed restructuring plan. Under the plan, the company − controlled by China-based ByteDance company − intends to create 321 new roles, with opportunities provided to affected employees to apply for those jobs.
Following a consultation process with employees, the company last week offered a finalised mutual termination agreement to some affected workers. It is expected that employees who sign off on the agreement will finish work at TikTok at the end of the month.
Among the various clauses in the agreement, one condition requires employees not to make requests or complaints under data protection legislation regarding the company’s processing of their personal data.
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The agreement also requires employees not to pursue any type of complaint, proceedings or claim against the company.
The agreement includes a lump-sum payout, calculated at one month’s pay per year of service, plus an extra month’s pay.
The majority of the affected roles are within the company’s trust and safety division. Also at risk are roles in the company’s artificial intelligence data service and operations team, responsible for annotation and search operations services.
In internal TikTok correspondence, seen by The Irish Times, the company said it was proposing the job cuts in Dublin as part of efforts to increase efficiency and align with the company’s global priorities.
Under the plan, work undertaken by the affected employees in Dublin will be redistributed to TikTok operations in other countries, outsourced to vendor companies and handled by artificial intelligence-enabled or “automated” solutions, among other measures.
Some of the workload will be incorporated into the responsibilities of newly created Dublin-based roles, it is proposed.
Certain types of current Dublin-based roles will be eliminated completely under the proposed restructuring, it is stated in internal correspondence.
Employees affected by the lay-off process who spoke to The Irish Times expressed concerns over the fairness of the company’s internal processes for redeployment and retention and about the general downturn in the tech sector’s jobs market in Dublin.
At the time of publication, TikTok had not responded to a request for comment.
One TikTok employee said the process for retention and redeployment of staff – including to newly created roles under the restructuring plan – was “largely considered unfair” by the affected workers. As part of the process, some of the employees were tested on company policies not relevant to their day-to-day work, he said.
He described the TikTok’s approach to the collective redundancy consultation process as a “box-ticking exercise”, with little room for concessions.
“They know exactly where their legal boundaries are and are careful to stay within them,” he said.
“The workload [for affected jobs in Dublin] has decreased, and [the company] don’t anticipate it getting any higher,” the worker said, speaking to the company’s rationale for the job cuts.
He noted a marked increase in the use of AI at the company, but said he believed this was not the “primary driving factor” for the restructuring proposals.
John Bohan, an organiser with the Communications Workers’ Union, which represents some of the affected TikTok staffers, said current legislation around collective redundancies was ”failing workers".
“The redundancy process in TikTok hammers home the need for union recognition and collective bargaining in big tech. Our members found themselves stalled and blocked by the company. They found so-called mitigations [of redundancies] – including new roles – to be little more than box-ticking exercises,” he said.
TikTok is a “fast-paced” environment, with workers expected to adapt quickly to new company policies, another affected employee said. There exists a baseline level of stress among some employees, he also said. “There is always this sense of instability [among staff],” he said.
In light of this work environment, the worker described how many had opted to take the offered severance package.
Another staffer noted how a changing jobs market within the tech sector compounded difficulties caused by redundancies at TikTok.
TikTok is not alone in its efforts to reduce its workforce. In a reflection of global trends, several tech giants based in Ireland – including Meta, Amazon and Microsoft – have this year announced job cuts.
“Work in this industry now doesn’t mean that you’re safe; you don’t have stability any more,” said one employee affected by the job cuts. “I guess this is the new reality of tech: you have a job, you never know if you’re going to have your job tomorrow or not.
“I see people, colleagues who are very affected [by the TikTok redundancies]. Their mental health’s not the best. Especially now, because the market to find a new job is not so easy in Dublin compared to how it was a couple of years ago,” he said.
TikTok opened its Dublin base in June 2020 with 20 staff. It expanded rapidly, at one stage increasing its headcount to about 3,000.
Subsequent rounds of lay-offs have reduced that number significantly. In 2024, the company scrapped plans to occupy a second Dublin office building. Separately, TikTok announced that its first data centre in Europe would be located here, to house European user data, as part of the company’s move to assuage data protection concerns.
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