Engineers at Meta's data center in Clonee, County Meath, Ireland, plan to go on strike next week.

The Connect trade union additionally claims that Meta has threatened to outsource the jobs of the strikers in a union-busting move, something the company has denied.

The union said that staff planned to strike for 24 hours from 7am on Monday, 7 October, due to unilateral changes to worker shift patterns after making a number of redundancies.

Connect said Meta would move from a six-week shift cycle to a new four-week shift cycle which will see its members working more weekends and night shifts.

"This new four-week shift cycle has been introduced since 16 September, despite our members not agreeing, nor were counter-proposals from our members considered," Connect's Brian McAvinue told RTE.

"We also must make it very clear to Meta that any attempt to cover our members' work with non-union members would be a major escalation of this dispute which would require a response from our union," McAvinue added.

Following the initial threat of a strike, which members voted roughly three-to-one in favor of, Connect said that a number of workers now may not strike after being told by Meta that their staff could be outsourced.

Meta denied the claim in a comment to DCD, and added that it does not engage directly with trade unions but has been “consulting directly with these employees over the past six months to discuss the change and agree ways in which their existing highly competitive compensation and benefits package would be adjusted to reflect the change.”

The company also said that the strike would "not affect" the operations of the data center "and involves a small group of employees who were asked to implement a new shift pattern in May."