The Corporate Accountability Problem: Navruz Avloni of Avloni Law on Representing Employees in the Tech Industry
By: Eva Keller
Not long ago, a mass layoff signaled that something had gone seriously wrong. A company was bleeding money, losing market share, or facing collapse. The layoffs were the last resort.
That is no longer the case. Navruz Avloni, founder of Avloni Law and a California employment attorney with over a decade of litigation experience, has watched the calculus shift in real time. “Companies are routinely doing layoffs for efficiency and profit reasons,” she says, “not because they’re in genuine financial distress. I have seen folks reach out to us who were impacted by layoffs where numerous people were affected, and the company’s profits were going up.”
The pattern Avloni sees most often is difficult to challenge precisely because it is so deliberately vague. Employees are told their positions have been eliminated, only to see the same role posted days later. Restructurings are announced without any coherent explanation of what changed or why certain people were selected. “Often people are told it’s not performance-based,” she explains. “But then there’s no consistency among the people who were eliminated either. Workers are left with no real explanation.”
When the Algorithm Decides
In Avloni’s view, what has accelerated this problem is the growing use of automated tools to evaluate workers and drive layoff decisions, without the transparency or human oversight needed to catch when those tools go wrong.
She points to a recent lawsuit involving a major tech company as an illustration. The company’s AI system tracked productivity and scored workers based on activity metrics. The problem was that the system did not account for approved medical or family leave. Employees who had taken protected leave were disproportionately flagged and selected for layoffs. “A supposedly neutral algorithm,” Avloni says, “can reproduce discrimination at scale.”
The legal exposure in cases like this is significant, but so is the practical difficulty of proving it. Employees are rarely given visibility into how decisions were made. The criteria shift. The company holds the data. “It’s really difficult to keep these companies accountable,” Avloni says. “They don’t take responsibility for the disproportionate impact, even when that impact is potentially illegal.”
Workers Absorb the Risk. Companies Collect the Reward.
Beyond the legal questions, Avloni sees a structural imbalance that she believes is eroding something harder to quantify: the basic trust between employer and employee.
“Workers are expected to absorb the risks of technological change while companies and executives receive most of the benefits,” she says.
The consequences of a layoff extend well beyond a lost paycheck. Avloni regularly sees clients whose immigration status is disrupted, whose parental leave rights are cut short, whose medical treatment is interrupted when insurance is terminated. And for the employees who remain, the damage is different but no less real. “Repeated layoffs destroy morale,” she says. “The remaining employees become fearful. They’re less loyal. They’re less willing to take risks or raise concerns.”
That last point carries particular weight in the employment law context. Workers who fear for their jobs are less likely to report harassment, flag compliance issues, or push back on conduct they know is wrong. The chilling effect is invisible on a balance sheet but shows up eventually, in turnover, in litigation, in the slow erosion of whatever made a company worth working for.
“A company thrives when its employees are committed, dedicated, and loyal, and when they have the freedom to do their best work,” Avloni says. “But how can you create that kind of workforce when the relationship between employers and employees has been eroded, and workers are treated as disposable?”
Accountability Without Transparency Is Not Accountability
Avloni is not suggesting companies should never use automated tools in workforce decisions. Her concern is how those tools are used. When companies make decisions affecting employees’ livelihoods without transparency or meaningful human review, they shift the risk of error onto workers while making it harder to hold anyone accountable.
She believes meaningful reform requires several things: disclosure requirements when automated tools materially influence layoff or performance decisions, bias audits of those tools, and removing protected leave periods from any algorithmic scoring. Above all, she argues for genuine human review before finalizing decisions that alter someone’s livelihood.
“The central issue is not simply whether AI was used,” she says. “It is whether anyone takes responsibility for the decisions it produces, and for the workers harmed as a result.”
For now, Avloni is working to make it easier for affected workers to identify when they may have a claim. She is developing a resource through Avloni Law: a questionnaire for people who have been laid off, asking whether they recently took leave, filed a complaint, or were part of a workplace investigation. The goal is to surface patterns that are currently invisible precisely because no one is looking for them systematically.
“We’ve seen the patterns,” she says. “We just haven’t always been able to prove them. That’s what we’re trying to change.”
Disclaimer: The content in this article is provided for general knowledge. It does not constitute legal advice, and readers should seek advice from qualified legal professionals regarding particular cases or situations.
