AI & Worker Voice

New artificial intelligence (AI) technologies are being integrated into a range of workplaces—from warehouse work to nursing to fashion modeling—with promises to dramatically transform the landscape of work. Yet the highly disparate ways in which AI systems are designed, implemented, and governed within organizations can exacerbate existing racial, gender, and class inequalities, reinforce labor precarity, and erode workers’ job quality, agency, control at work. While worker voice and participation have been found to play a crucial role in both mitigating these risks and realizing productivity gains from AI-based technologies, most workers do not have a say in, or influence over, how these technologies are deployed in their workplaces. There is a critical need to consider the conditions under which workers are able to decide or have influence over how they use these technologies, as well as how employers apply them to direct work and manage performance. 

This three-day convening aims to advance equitable, democratic, and worker-informed frameworks for AI design, implementation, and governance. We will bring together academic researchers from different disciplines and practitioners from different sectors to examine AI’s workplace impacts and develop strategies for advancing more worker-centered approaches to AI adoption and deployment. Through a series of keynote talks, panel presentations, moderated small group discussions, co-design workshops, and social spaces, we aim to collectively map issues that bridge occupational and sectoral divides, identify gaps in existing research,  and explore how workers, unions, coalitions, and policymakers can help build strategies for democratic governance of AI in the workplace and in our economy. This convening will generate both academic and public outputs, resources and materials geared towards practitioners, and other avenues for future work and collaboration. By advancing trans-disciplinary and cross-sectoral dialogue among researchers, labor advocates and practitioners, this convening will help  develop a more comprehensive understanding of AI’s effects, while also building coalitions to support workers and worker organizations in curbing the harms of AI.