Introduction to AI and Worker Power: Understanding Key Issues and Impacts for Workers

Updated September 11, 2025

Authors: Katherine Eyster, Chief of Staff; Sara Steffens, Director of Worker Power

Executive Summary 

Artificial intelligence (AI) and related digital management tools are rapidly reshaping the workplace, raising urgent questions about their impact on workers’ rights, worker power, and job quality. The unchecked use of AI threatens to deepen inequality, erode labor protections, and weaken workers’ ability to organize. Without strong safeguards, AI will accelerate economic insecurity—especially for lower-wage workers. But with proper guardrails, oversight, and worker involvement, AI could instead be deployed to strengthen workplace protections and improve job quality. Regulating the impact of AI on workers is a vital and often overlooked policy priority for tens of millions of working people in communities across the country.

The Stakes for Workers

  • Expanding employer control: AI is increasingly used to screen, hire, monitor, direct, evaluate, surveil, discipline, and fire workers, often without transparency, human oversight, or processes for workers to appeal decisions.

  • Deepening inequality: Technological change historically increases disparities when labor protections are weak; the rapid deployment of AI is repeating this pattern and demands policy interventions to rebalance power.

  • Insufficient safeguards: Federal law lacks a comprehensive framework for regulating workplace AI, leaving major gaps in transparency, fairness, accountability, and enforcement.

  • Worker voice is critical: Labor unions and frontline workers must have a central role in shaping how AI is designed, deployed, and governed.

Key Areas of AI Impact

1. Hiring: Employers are increasingly using AI to screen and hire applicants, set wages, and assess performance. These systems often rely on biased or opaque criteria, risking unlawful discrimination against women, older workers, people with disabilities, immigrants, and workers of color. Stronger federal safeguards are needed to ensure transparency, accountability, and recourse for job seekers.

2. Surveillance: AI tools monitor keystrokes, facial expressions, movements, and social interactions, frequently without worker consent. Such surveillance chills organizing, facilitates unlawful retaliation, and exacerbates worker stress and burnout. Vast amounts of worker data are being collected and sold. Without regulation, AI enables invasive monitoring and undermines worker rights, protections, and privacy.

3. Control: Algorithmic systems dictate tasks, schedules, performance metrics, and even individualized wages, reducing worker autonomy, rights, and power. Opaque AI systems can be used to justify retaliatory discipline and weaken bargaining power. At the same time, if designed with worker input, AI could be used to improve safety, ensure fair scheduling, and enhance employer compliance.

4. Secrecy: Proprietary algorithms and opaque decision-making processes prevent workers from understanding or challenging AI-driven decisions, even if they are unlawful. This information asymmetry also hinders unions’ ability to negotiate fair terms and makes public accountability difficult, especially where litigation is required to access data and decision-making.

5. Displacement: AI is already displacing workers across industries like retail, transportation, and manufacturing and is expanding into healthcare, finance, and IT. Workforce training programs are necessary but insufficient; broader job creation and robust, expansive safety net policies are essential.

Levers for Change

To protect workers in the age of AI, multiple stakeholders—including lawmakers, unions, regulators, employers, and technologists—must act. Urgent needs include:

  • Legislation: Establish federal standards for transparency, accountability, data privacy, fairness, and worker voice in AI deployment. Require audits, algorithmic impact assessments, and human review of major employment decisions. Ensure that agencies have the authority, staffing, and budgets to enforce existing laws, while also advancing new, comprehensive worker-centered AI legislation.

  • Executive action: Prioritize agency enforcement and regulation by strengthening labor and civil rights oversight, funding regulators adequately, and deploying AI tools to detect workplace violations. Expand investment in public-interest research on AI and the future of work. Require federal contractors to meet robust standards for AI use in employment practices. 

  • Structural reforms: Expand workforce development programs alongside robust safety nets, including wage insurance, portable benefits, and stronger unemployment systems. Invest in public-interest AI tools designed to support workers and democratic accountability.

The impact of AI on working people is shaped by policy choices. Without intervention, AI will consolidate corporate control and erode worker rights. With strong legal guardrails and meaningful worker participation, it can instead help enhance safety, fairness, and opportunity. Protecting workers in the age of AI requires centering worker voice, building enforceable rights, and governing technology in the public interest.