How Labor Unions Are Navigating AI

A digital replica of your face? Programmed to know everything about your job that you know? Owned by your boss? Recent headlines about why and how artificial intelligence (AI) is being implemented at work are sparking anxiety among workers from the entertainment industry in Hollywood to the meatpacking industry in the Midwest.

Economists and writers speculate openly about when, not if, AI will unemploy millions of white- and blue-collar workers. A study from PwC indicates that CEOs expect to reduce headcount in 2024 due to generative AI. Even if employers do not want to automate their workforces, they might want to understand how AI can help those workers do their jobs better.

In response, labor unions are stepping up, seeking a win-win balance for workers and employers. "Unions sometimes are mischaracterized as technology luddites. This is far from the truth," says Tim Noonan, Director at the International Trade Union Confederation, in an interview jointly conducted by New America and the World Economic Forum. According to Noonan, whose organization is part of the Forum’s Global AI Action Alliance, “Technology can make jobs better, and unions are ready to pursue co-creation of technology augmentation plans with employers, workers, and even technology vendors.

Across the world and industries, unions are starting to work with employers to maximize benefits and mitigate risks of AI, and, hopefully, pass on a fair share of the resulting productivity gains to workers. That outcome helps businesses and workers alike.

The highest-profile labor fight over AI so far came from Hollywood, where the Writers’ Guild of America (WGA) and Screen Actors’ Guild (SAG-AFTRA) reached an agreement with film studios on how AI can support, not replace, their members’ contributions. As labor scholar Adam Seth Litwick explained in the New York Times, WGA and the studios agreed that screenwriters can use AI in specific instances, and studios can use AI to supplement writers’ works as long as the human writers receive a fair share of the gains added by the AI. Actors, meanwhile, now must give their consent before employers can scan their likenesses to digital replicants and pay them for their likenesses.

Resolutions like this are becoming more common as America embraces a technology-based industrial policy emphasizing research and development leadership in key emerging technology areas, including AI. President Biden’s recent Executive Order on AI declared that “as AI creates new jobs and industries, all workers need a seat at the table, including through collective bargaining.” Writing for the Harvard Business Review, Bloomberg Beta’s Roy Bahat, MIT’s Thomas Kochan, and Aspen Institute’s Liba Wenig Rubenstein argued that “companies achieve the best returns on investments in new technology when they merge implementation with complementary changes in work processes, employee training, and worker input.”

Applying these principles, in December 2023, Microsoft and the AFL-CIO announced a partnership around AI. Microsoft pledged neutrality in employee union organizing, and the technology giant and the AFL-CIO’s member unions laid out goals of using AI to increase productivity, augment human work, and help workers transition to new positions if AI does displace them.

In exchange for these protections, Microsoft seeks to get workers involved in the early development of new AI technologies, using workers’ “expertise to brainstorm, develop and implement new ideas,” as AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler put it.

If soliciting worker input around the development and deployment of AI sounds tedious, consider the alternative.

According to reporting from Axios, in the culinary industry, “AI has become the biggest tech trend in quick-serve restaurants,” as restaurants tinker with AI-powered “chefs,” “waiters,” and “drive-through attendants.” While some AI uses succeed, others fail badly. Blunders by the AI drive-through attendant at union-averse McDonald’s subjugated the company's ridicule on social media. If companies like McDonald's were to either collaborate with unions or leverage techniques such as “collaborative design” to include worker voices when making decisions around AI. Indeed, quick-service restaurants across the country have benefited from innovations sensitive to “team members’ real-life working environments,” such as simple training modules for preparing new and seasonal menu items.

That is why businesses benefit from consistent employee input, presented by an independent elected representative, their union. Shuler’s vision of early employee input on new technology has a sound economic basis: managers and owners often struggle to understand the problems and opportunities that exist on the workplace floor without good faith and independent feedback from their employees.

Nonunion employees might fear retaliation for voicing concerns around AI; in contrast, union representatives can communicate collective worker sentiments to employers without any individual workers having to stick their necks out on the line.

To ensure they play this role effectively, unions are setting transparent bargaining goals around AI. For example, the Communication Workers of America recently announced three principles in AI negotiations: accountability, proactive bargaining, and early & meaningful worker voice. The union’s stated goal is “not to stop new technologies but to ensure the benefits of new technologies are broadly shared,” recognizing that “New AI systems in the workplace have the potential to create economic gains when they lead to increased productivity.”

All that said, Fears and conflicts can still emerge between unions and employers. As SAG’s members ratified their agreement with studios, one critic expressed concerns that vague contract language appeared to create a loophole for employers to replace an actor with an AI replica if they kept a scene’s “photography and soundtrack…substantially as scripted, performed and/or recorded.”

To be clear, unions and employers almost always settle unclear language like that in arbitration, a process in which representatives of the union and management make their case to a professional conflict-resolver, who then makes a decision. However, that union member's concern reminds us that both sides in a labor agreement need to communicate clearly and be willing to repeatedly negotiate to build a working mutual trust. The story does not end when the deal is signed.

Still, collaborating with workers around AI implementation is worth it. With AI, unions get the best deal for workers not just by extracting money or by preventing change but by finding the most efficient way for businesses to act consistent with workers’ interests. By “growing the pie” with productivity gains, union members’ fair share grows with it.