Aug 23, 2025 06:13 PM
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TikTok accused of ‘union-busting’ after laying off hundreds of content moderators
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/po...12500.html
INTRO: TikTok’s Chinese owners have been accused of “bare-faced union busting” by announcing hundreds of layoffs just a week before staff were due to vote on unionisation.
The social media platform’s Beijing-based owner ByteDance announced on Friday that hundreds of staff in its London office would be made redundant, with their roles being reallocated to offices across Europe and outsourced to third-party providers.
It came just a week before a vote on a bid by employees in the firm’s content moderation arm to establish a branch of the Communication Workers Union (CWU) for its staff. The announcement of redundancies on Friday raised fears that ByteDance was seeking to pile pressure on staff ahead of the vote on unionisation.
But on Friday morning, TikTok wrote to the CWU announcing it has pulled its support for the ballot altogether while the redundancy consultation process takes place. In a letter to the CWU shortly after the redundancies were announced, a senior ByteDance employee said: “Given these exceptional circumstances, we have decided that it is necessary for us to suspend the planned voluntary ballot process with immediate effect.”
CWU national officer John Chadfield told The Independent: “The timing is deliberate… and it is deliberately cruel. It is bare-faced union busting, leaves the members who have organised facing massive uncertainty and, from what we can see, they are just going to be offshoring these jobs to a third-party in Lisbon.”
The union has been working with ByteDance since last November to gain recognition for TikTok’s London-based content moderators, who Mr Chadfield said “have the most dangerous job on the internet”. “The stuff they have to see is literally the stuff of nightmares,” he added.
He also warned that while ByteDance has said it plans to adopt AI to take up some content moderation responsibilities, the technology is not yet ready and human moderators will be essential... (MORE - details)
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/po...12500.html
INTRO: TikTok’s Chinese owners have been accused of “bare-faced union busting” by announcing hundreds of layoffs just a week before staff were due to vote on unionisation.
The social media platform’s Beijing-based owner ByteDance announced on Friday that hundreds of staff in its London office would be made redundant, with their roles being reallocated to offices across Europe and outsourced to third-party providers.
It came just a week before a vote on a bid by employees in the firm’s content moderation arm to establish a branch of the Communication Workers Union (CWU) for its staff. The announcement of redundancies on Friday raised fears that ByteDance was seeking to pile pressure on staff ahead of the vote on unionisation.
But on Friday morning, TikTok wrote to the CWU announcing it has pulled its support for the ballot altogether while the redundancy consultation process takes place. In a letter to the CWU shortly after the redundancies were announced, a senior ByteDance employee said: “Given these exceptional circumstances, we have decided that it is necessary for us to suspend the planned voluntary ballot process with immediate effect.”
CWU national officer John Chadfield told The Independent: “The timing is deliberate… and it is deliberately cruel. It is bare-faced union busting, leaves the members who have organised facing massive uncertainty and, from what we can see, they are just going to be offshoring these jobs to a third-party in Lisbon.”
The union has been working with ByteDance since last November to gain recognition for TikTok’s London-based content moderators, who Mr Chadfield said “have the most dangerous job on the internet”. “The stuff they have to see is literally the stuff of nightmares,” he added.
He also warned that while ByteDance has said it plans to adopt AI to take up some content moderation responsibilities, the technology is not yet ready and human moderators will be essential... (MORE - details)