Commentary: The tech workers building AI are scared of it, too

Turning those frustrations into sustained organisation requires grappling with legal obstacles. Unlike in much of Western Europe, where workers are unionised at high levels and can bargain as an entire sector to address problems in their industries, in the United States the legal system makes organising and bargaining exceedingly difficult. The National Labor Relations Act, the federal law that governs organising and bargaining among private sector workers, promises to protect the right to unionise but often fails to do so in practice. 

Employers can delay union recognition for months or years through multiple legal challenges. When they illegally fire workers who organise, a disturbingly common practice, or fail to bargain in good faith, the penalties are so weak that they are nearly nonexistent.

TECH WORKERS STILL HAVE POWER

Even where unions exist, the law requires employers to bargain only with their own employees; it does not require bargaining to benefit all workers in a sector or a supply chain. This structure is especially ill-suited for responding to concerns raised by AI, which is built through chains of engineers, contractors, cloud workers, data annotators, content moderators and vendors spread across firms.

Despite the obstacles, American tech workers have more power than they may realise. 

Tech workers, especially engineers building generative AI, are expensive to hire, expensive to train and difficult to replace. They understand the systems they are building better than the regulators trying to govern those systems, better than the executives deploying them and certainly better than the pundits debating their consequences. When they act collectively, they can help safeguard not only their own interests, but society’s interests more broadly.

Workers in other industries have shown what that kind of leverage can accomplish. Hollywood writers and actors did not wait for Congress to solve the threat of generative AI; they used strikes and collective bargaining to win rules over how studios could use scripts, voices and likenesses. 

Earlier in history, autoworkers transformed what were low-wage jobs into the backbone of the middle class, and their organisation’s leadership went on to support the civil rights movement. Worker power can do more than improve individual workplaces: It can reshape an industry’s obligations to the public.

If we want AI policy that actually works for the public, then decisions cannot be made by executives and investors alone. Workers must have a say in what they build, whom it serves and how it is used. If they do, the rest of us will have a better chance of living with technology governed by democratic values, not merely by corporate and military imperatives.

Kate Andrias is a professor at Columbia Law School, where she directs the Columbia Labor Lab and the Center for Constitutional Governance. This article originally appeared in The New York Times.