Fighting for workers amid the A.I. wave
A weekend among union organizers offered a reminder that clarity and courage still exists on the left — even as the ground shifts beneath workers and their defenders.
A few weeks ago, I was at a conference in Los Angeles, put on by a union, the NUHW, that I’ve been working with on a big writing project.
The conference took place just a few weeks after Charlie Kirk’s assassination and the politics of the moment were bleak. They’ve been bleak. They’re still bleak. But I’d spent those intense weeks soaking up news and commentary on the internet in a way that I haven’t for many years — a way that I swore I would never do a few years back, after feeling like I’d been robbed of too much mental space during Trump I.
But something at the conference lifted me out of that fog. The first day, the union hosted a panel about resistance in this intense era, featuring, among others, the current president of the California Federation of Labor Unions, former assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez.
In the assembly, Gonzalez made a name for herself through her staunch advocacy for workers, most famously leading the fight to ensure that gig workers in the state were treated not like second-class contractors, but like any other employees who provide the core labor a company’s business model relies on. The measure she wrote and got passed, AB 5, officially codified rules that effectively required many gig workers to be treated as employees and thus be entitled to more benefits, pay and rights. The measure was impactful — enough so that the gig companies joined together to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to overturn it in a ballot measure, Prop. 22, that passed after a record industry-sponsored ad blitz in 2020.
Gonzalez is a firebrand — someone who keeps a framed letter banning her from Walmart’s stores, addressed to her after she advocated for better worker pay, on her wall. She has a reputation for saying what she thinks and not mincing words or tailoring her beliefs for decorum or politeness.
At the conference, her no-nonsense directness about the assault on workers’ rights underway right now — including the potential for the NLRB to be ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court — was a breath of fresh air at a time when leadership remains in perilously short supply on the left. And she said one thing that I knew I had to follow up with her about.
The Labor Fed represents more than three million workers in 1,300 unions across the state, and is labor’s — and one of the left’s — most powerful voices of advocacy in Sacramento. Gonzalez mentioned that the group was increasingly focused on A.I., after hearing from member unions that workers were warning about its encroachment at work.
We spoke this week. Gonzalez talked to me about some problematic ways workers are encountering A.I. at work, what she thought of the governor’s moves recently — signing a couple of limited A.I. regulations into law while vetoing others — and why it’s critical that policymakers act urgently on the issue now. This conversation has been lightly edited and condensed.
Hard Reset: Hi, thanks for joining us. Tell us a bit about the Labor Fed’s various efforts to rein in A.I.
Lorena Gonzalez: We started our work on A.I. when we started doing a warehouse quota bill, targeting Amazon’s use of quotas. This was a few years ago, I was in the legislature. We got vetoed the first time and then eventually got the bill signed. When I came to the Fed, we realized that the changes [with A.I.] were coming quicker.
We helped pass one on making tech changes in public transit, like autonomous vehicle technology, a mandatory subject of bargaining. With SAG-AFTRA, when the writers were coming off the strike in 2023, we started working on their issues: there were things that they couldn’t get in their contract, but we got legislatively, like restricting the [automated] use of people’s digital likeness or voices without their permission.
At a certain point we realized, we don’t know if we should go industry by industry. So this year we started looking at basic protections workers should have around A.I. in dealing with privacy and workers’ rights. We had three bills; the first one we called ‘No Bosses in the Bathroom,’ a privacy bill. We were exploring the ways that a company can monitor workers in places that should be private, including the bathroom, break rooms, and when you leave work — at home. That’s been stripped down, but it’s still on the Senate floor.
The second one, we got all the way to the governor and it got vetoed. It was a measure that said you can’t fire or discipline people without having some human oversight, SB 7.
The last one was about data, facial recognition and neuromonitoring. We’re going to go back to that one too. Getting the governor to engage has been exceptionally hard. We thought we had a chance this year with SB 7, because we had talked to his office so many times, but our understanding is that as soon as they put in front of the governor, he said no.
We’re looking at coming back and doing a more outwardly facing campaign this year because we keep seeing, in focus groups and in polling, that people are really concerned and they really do want legislative changes. They want guardrails. We need leaders who are willing to lead on this issue.
HR: What kind of things are you just hearing from your federation, from workers, about how A.I. is being employed on the job?
LG: We have people monitoring what is being sold to companies for surveillance and privacy. Workers don’t even know what’s being used to surveil them, and that’s a problem. But we’re watching this, keeping an eye on trade shows to find products that are being sold to monitor workers.
We’re hearing a lot about healthcare — not like fearful of “it’s coming,” but that it’s already here. We’ve heard stories about how overriding an A.I. decision in the hospital is extremely hard. And as a result, medical practitioners have to do unnecessary things.
We had this nurse, she’s on an oncology unit, and sepsis is a big issue for people who are in the hospital a lot. She was saying that now they have a computer program that decides when somebody may be going into sepsis, even though you could be a nurse saying that this is not accurate, this person’s not going into sepsis. When the computer says that, you have to order the test, because it takes too long to override the computer. And when you test for sepsis, you’re poking the person and you actually are exposing them to the possibility of getting sepsis.
So we have not only that issue, but then comes the question of, who’s liable if it’s wrong? Is it the hospital? Is it the programmer?
They’re also using A.I models to either do triage or even basic intake for behavioral and mental health. We’ll probably have a bill with NUHW and some other folks this year on that. We think that should be banned.
HR: Regarding biometric monitoring, are there specific examples you’re thinking of where that’s being used?
LG: We heard from our farm workers that they’re being asked to use bracelets that are monitoring how they’re picking and how quickly they’re picking. We don’t know a ton about that … The laws that exist are for outdated technology — like your boss cannot videotape or audiotape you in the bathroom. So right now, you have some rights to privacy, but you don’t have a right to privacy for them to measure your body heat or to examine what’s in your urine.
The body heat started happening with COVID in Amazon warehouses. They would measure your heat to see if you shouldn’t be at work, if you were going to spread COVID. So we know that it exists. The urine analysis is in trade magazines and things that are being marketed to companies.
We’re trying hard to get out in front and to get some cooperation from the legislature and the governor to say, Hey, at some point, do workers at least have the right to know? I think they do. You can’t make a choice about something if you don’t even know.
HR: You were on the front lines of the effort to make sure that gig work complied with our old laws. Social media was also another big deal when you were in the legislature. How do you think the A.I industry and the boom that it’s created compares to or is different from the previous era in tech?
LG: When I started in labor, we were fighting Walmart. It was a traditional employer but was so large that its ability to stop unionization, stop us from being able to empower workers, and control prices, salaries and the market, was such an issue. Their supercenters were the big thing; they were taking over good middle-class jobs.
And then Uber and Lyft come in and basically they’re saying that we should have different expectations of them because you’re hired or fired through an app. Our whole thing was that didn’t make them different. Do you remember when Uber and Lyft said, we’ll just pull out of California? We were saying they can’t pull out of California, we’re a quarter of their market share. But suddenly everybody was like, Oh no, how will I ever get to the airport? They had become too big to fail. And the tech industry [as a whole] wanted their own rules. They wanted to break rules and not be held accountable. By the time we caught up with what social media was, it was already too big and dominant. Children were already too exposed.
So with A.I. we’ve been working on it long before any other states and pushing the idea that we’ve got to regulate it. We don’t want it to become too big, too ingrained in our lives, too normalized, to pass regulations and guardrails.
HR: Do you think we’ll do a better job this time?
LG: We have to. I think it’s a kind of crash or burn situation. I think if we don’t regulate that the effect it has on humanity is going to be too large. And so I’d like to get in front of it and answer these questions quicker. If we have no guardrails, the next five, six years, we’re done. It’s going to be too big.
Workers and the electorate more broadly want guardrails. They’re afraid of this. The amount of job losses that we’re looking at will surpass those that we saw during NAFTA. We will lose people, who will drop out of the workforce and be bitter for the rest of their lives because of the loss of jobs.
HR: What do you think of the one of the bills that the governor did sign, SB 53, which does require some transparency and safety protocols at A.I. companies and adds some whistleblower protections for A.I. companies. The press generally framed this as a significant move, with the NYT calling it a “sweeping A.I. law.” Do you think that was warranted?
LG: The A.I. companies supported it, right? Any industry that’s making money and says, “Oh yes, we welcome these regulations,” you just have to naturally be suspicious that they don’t go far enough. We don’t want rules that are so unhelpful and basic that then [companies] have permission to do everything else. So I’m a little concerned.
HR: What do you think of how Gov. Newsom has led on the issue of A.I.?
LG: The governor, and I’ve been very clear with him, with his staff, with everybody — I think he is really missing the boat here. For somebody who wants to be a national leader, he needs to show that yes, you can have innovation and technology and still protect people. That it has not been happening, whether it’s children from chatbots, whether it’s workers, whether it’s jobs … And so I’m disappointed that he’s not engaging. He’s been good on a lot of labor issues and I don’t want to discount that. But when it comes to A.I. and tech — and this is the biggest threat facing workers right now — he just won’t engage. And that’s not leadership. That’s just turning a blind eye.
HR: How do you understand the politics of it?
LG: It can’t possibly be concern about voters because we’ve polled it so many times. We’ve done focus groups. Voters want common sense guardrails. I think this governor has always been enamored with big tech and with advances in technology … And now tech is playing a big role politically. And so I think that helps convince people that they should keep from doing anything to upset them.
HR: Who else, besides labor unions, are pushing back on A.I. politically right now?
LG: It does feel like it’s just us sometimes. But there are foundations, like Tech Equity, and there are some folks when it comes to privacy and surveillance like the ACLU. You know who else is interested? We’ve been hoping to work with them even more — the Catholic church. How much they get involved in state legislation is still yet to be seen.
HR: How high would you say this issue ranks, just in terms of all of the federation’s political priorities in the next year or two?
LG: Oh, it’s at the top. So many of us lived through the aftermath of NAFTA, we’re like, “Hey, we can’t just sit by and do nothing.” We’re doing this at the state level because the federal government refuses to act. But now we’re saying, well, if the governor won’t act, what we’re going to be pursuing next year is local regulation. Can we get some of our more pro-worker minded city councils, county boards and mayors to take this on? Overall, I have never seen a lack of leadership when it comes to an issue that is going to change people’s lives so much.
HR: Thank you for chatting with us.
Here’s what else we’re reading this week:
I Led Product Safety at OpenAI. Don’t Trust Its Claims About ‘Erotica.’ (NYT)
“AI may not simply be ‘a bubble,’ or even an enormous bubble. It may be the ultimate bubble. What you might cook up in a lab if your aim was to engineer the Platonic ideal of a tech bubble. One bubble to burst them all…” (Wired)
The Washington Post has apparently stopped disclosing the potential for conflicts of interest, as NPR found three recent editorials that ran with positions aligned with Jeff Bezos’ or Amazon’s financial interests without the usual disclaimers. (NPR)
The Roosevelt Institute dropped a report after conducting exit interviews with more than 45 high-level former Biden administration staffers about what Democrats could have done / could do to revitalize the party and the federal government when they’re in power. Amidst the never ending talk about moving even more to the center and finding common cause with the right-wing, this report underscores an opposite approach: moving further left, reforming governance, and being less afraid to pick fights around causes for working people even if they are controversial. Greg Sargent has a good write-up in The New Republic, and former FTC spokesman Douglas Farrar summarized key points on X.
Yale researchers found that Elon Musk’s foray into Washington might have cost Tesla the sales of more than one million vehicles. Seems like Matthew LaBrot was spot on.
Wow… I think what issues our Gov picks is based on funding and perhaps because he has an eye on a future presidency. The work of unions on behalf of the average worker is never over. Thank you for this article.