As AI spreads, workers turn to unions to protect their rights

As artificial intelligence threatens to destabilize the working lives of millions of Americans, workers across the country are increasingly turning to unions to demand protections — and new polling suggests they trust few other institutions to do the job.

Beyond the existential threat AI carries to eliminate hundreds of thousands of jobs and wipe out entire industries, employers are also turning to the technology to hire, fire, evaluate, discipline and surveil workers. 

A national survey conducted by David Binder Research in April that was promoted by the AFL-CIO, polling 1,164 registered-voter workers, found 78 percent said it was "extremely" or "very" important for policymakers to protect workers from AI's potential harms. More than 9 in 10 respondents backed requiring a human to make final employment decisions, guaranteeing AI-related training and mandating transparency when employers deploy the technology.

Even the poll's least popular proposal — expanding workers' ability to unionize specifically to protect their jobs from AI — still drew support from 75 percent of respondents.

While 94 percent of workers said employees should be told when AI is monitoring their work, just 7 percent of employed respondents said their employer had actually disclosed how or when that monitoring was happening. 

Nearly three-quarters said they'd be uncomfortable with AI analyzing their computer screens or tracking their location on the job — a fear workers in New York have already begun to voice directly. When the New York Times deployed AI tools to monitor employee performance, NewsGuild of New York president Susan DeCarava rebuked it as a violation of privacy and workers’ rights.

"Workers everywhere are under attack from the unethical use of artificial programs by bosses," she said at the time.

Asked which institutions were most likely to protect them from AI's risks, respondents were more than twice as likely to name labor unions as any other option — 38 percent chose unions, compared with 17 percent for Democrats, 10 percent for Republicans and just six percent for employers themselves. 

Nearly a fifth said no institution would protect them at all.

"These results make it clear: our Workers First Initiative on AI is not just a set of principles, but a mandate to deliver," AFL-CIO president Liz Shuler said of the findings. "The vast majority of America's workers agree on how to move forward on AI and who they trust to do it, and it's not Democrats, Republicans, Big Tech, or their employers — it's the labor movement."

Such a mandate is playing out most visibly in New York, whose economy — particularly sectors such as finance, media, healthcare, law and municipal government — are hyper-vulnerable to the potential effects of AI. 

Yet unions have already begun to address that vulnerability and are putting the trust that workers’ from workers to protect them against AI into action on several fronts: the New York State Nurses Association fighting AI-driven layoffs at Montefiore Medical Center, the Transport Workers Union polling riders to head off automated subway crews before contract talks begin, District Council 37 testifying about documented algorithmic bias at a state Senate hearing, and the NewsGuild of New York building picket lines and arbitration wins into a template that is spreading to other cases. 

With AI rapidly reshaping workplaces across the state, worker voices say that New York unions are best poised to remain at the forefront of efforts to ensure the technology supports workers rather than replaces or undermines them. The survey suggests they will enter that battle with a level of public trust unmatched by employers or elected officials.