Making Tech Work for Workers Lessons from A Statewide Conference on Labor, AI, and Building Power in California.

The Conference

On January 14th, 2025, workers, unions, community groups, and tech allies from across California joined together for Making Tech Work for Workers: A Statewide Conference on Labor, AI, and Building Power in California.

256 people from 136 organizations participated in 15 different panels and breakouts.

Here are highlights and lessons from the conference about how new workplace technologies like AI are affecting workers.

What’s happening on the ground?

AI is a buzzword, but it’s often misused. It’s also not the only technology that is transforming workplaces.

For that reason, we use the term digital technologies. This term includes AI while also including technologies such as video tracking, data collection tools, and wearable technologies.

Across industries, workers at the conference found similarities in each other’s stories and discovered shared harms from new technology entering their workplaces.

“The number one thing I've learned from people here today is the reminder that labor has more in common no matter what industry you're in. Today I have talked to folks who are in the gig economy. I've talked to our nurses. I've talked to education workers at college level. And realizing that we are all facing the same concerns. About our expertise being part of the conversation. About decisions being made either to us or with us. About the needs of bargaining.” -Tara Jeane, California Teachers Association

What are workers seeing?

Workers at the conference shared examples of three main types of digital technologies, and how they’ve been impacted by them:

  1. Electronic monitoring and other types of data collection
  2. Algorithmic management
  3. Automation of task and jobs

1. Electronic monitoring and other types of data collection

What workers are seeing:

Home care workers threatened with GPS tracking while they are with their clients

  • Harm: invasion of workers privacy

Warehouse workers and hospital staff being tracked through the equipment they use on the job

  • Harm: data being used for disciplinary purposes

Actors concerned that they don’t own their image or likeness

  • Harm: their image could be used by the industry to create new content without consent or compensation

These are all examples of electronic monitoring, the use of digital technologies to collect data about workers and their activities.

2. Algorithmic management

What workers are seeing:

Gig workers having their wages set by an algorithm

  • Harm: lower, unpredictable, or discriminatory wages

Retail workers having their schedules set by an algorithm

  • Harm: unpredictable schedules and under-scheduling

Warehouse workers having their workflow dictated by an algorithm that prioritizes productivity

  • Harm: work speed-up to the point of harming physical safety

These are examples of algorithmic management, when employers use computer programs to analyze data and manage workers — making decisions like hiring workers, setting schedules, assigning tasks, or tracking performance.

3. Automation of tasks and jobs

What workers are seeing:

A therapist describing how patient screenings are now done by an automated tool

  • Harm: taking a task away from trained therapists

Ports introducing automated equipment

  • Harm: at one port, the number of mechanics employed dropped from 300 to 20

Truck drivers reporting that the technology being piloted for autonomous taxis could be transitioned to commercial trucking

  • Harm: automation of trucking jobs

A nurse and a computer programmer both concerned that digital technologies are automating the parts of their jobs that require expertise and judgement

  • Harm: potentially de-skilling workers

These are all examples of automation, the use of technologies such as software or robots to replace tasks or entire jobs.

What impacts do digital technologies have on equity and communities?

In addition to the impact these technologies have on workers at their job, they also pose new threats to community members.

Race and gender equity

Digital technologies can have a negative impact on equity. A few examples include:

  • New tech perpetuates existing hiring and promotion biases
  • Workers of color, immigrants, and women are more likely to work in low-wage sectors where we often see the most exploitative tech

Community harms

Surveillance at work and in communities are linked

  • Employers track workers outside of work
  • ICE has tracked people to work and raided their workplace

Impacts on patients, students, and customers

  • Workers across industries shared concerns with the negative impacts digital technologies could have on the people they serve, like students and patients

Digital technologies being used by the government

  • Data collection and the use of algorithms to make decisions has consequences for people being sentenced or paroled, applying for public benefits or accessing services

Democracy harms

  • Elections are being impacted by social media echo chambers and misinformation

What are the rights we need?

Conference participants identified a number of rights that are needed to make tech work for workers.

Organizing rights

  • Workers should have the right to organize without being surveilled or tracked
  • Workers should not be misclassified as independent contractors

Worker voice

  • Workers should be able to override decisions made by digital technologies
  • Workers can have a positive impact on technology design and implementation when they have a voice in the process

Technology rights

  • Workers should have more control over their data and how and when it is used
  • Digital technology should not be used to discriminate against workers
  • Technology should not contribute to unsafe conditions in the workplace

Responsible use of digital technologies in the public sector

  • Community and government workers need a seat at the table to ensure transparency, accountability, and equitable access

Solutions and actions

Conference participants discussed several actions that we can take to make tech work for workers. They highlighted that we need a multifaceted approach, where collective action, public policy, and coalition-building go hand in hand to be successful.

Solutions and actions: CONTINUED LEARNING

Here are a few examples of areas where conference participants wanted to learn more:

Learning from past victories

  • Hearing more about how unions have successfully navigated technological advances, like when hospitals moved from paper records to electronic charts without jobs being lost

Mapping the tech

  • Understanding tech industry power structures, venture capital, pension funds, and tech’s relationships to other industries

Learning from other movements

  • Learning from criminal justice and immigrant justice advocates about surveillance
  • Knowing the environmental impacts of tech
“I think the opportunity really is to build a deep amount of education in the worker rights movement, and to bring workers into the halls of our state houses, into the bargaining table, and into the engineering lab, and turn these technologies into technologies that work for working people.” -Amanda Ballantyne, AFL-CIO Technology Institute

Solutions and actions: ORGANIZING AND COLLECTIVE BARGAINING

Organizing strategies that participants shared during the conference include:

  • Organizing in industries most impacted by tech
  • Linking worker and community organizing campaigns
  • Cross-border organizing across the tech supply chain

Bargaining strategies that conference participants lifted up include:

  • Enforcing existing contract language
  • Information requests
  • Economic and employment security agreements
  • Technology-use guidelines and restrictions agreements
  • Labor management committees on technology
  • Strikes!

Examples:

  • Thousands of tech service workers organizing with the support of Silicon Valley Rising
  • Connecting global tech supply chain workers
  • Striking to win technology language
  • Filing Unfair Labor Practices about the implementation of a robot that stocks shelves
  • Using the union’s grievance process to establish a framework for discussing technology with the employer

Solutions and actions: COALITION BUILDING

Conference participants talked about the need for coalition building:

Cross-industry approach

  • Workers from different industries reflected that they are seeing similar digital technologies and harms, so we need a cross-industry approach

Identify cross-movement impacts

  • Find natural places where the technology unites workers with other movements

The importance of broad messaging

  • The public has growing concerns about digital technologies
  • We need to find impacts that activate multiple constituencies

Examples:

  • Workers across industries being tracked through the equipment they work with
  • Manufacturing workers campaigning with environmental justice advocates
“I think what we can do better is to stitch these fights, the fights that labor is leading within a broader tech justice movement that… contest this vision of narrow productivity and efficiency that is essentially a euphemism for productivity and consolidation of power for companies, not for workers, not for the broader public. So I think my vision for the future is that labor is at the forefront of really asking these bigger, bigger, bigger picture questions of the industry.” -Amba Kak, AI Now Institute

Solutions and actions: PUBLIC POLICY

Conference participants highlighted a number of policies that would help protect workers from technology harms:

Requiring transparency and disclosure of technology use

  • Requiring employers to inform workers about all systems used in the workplace

Prohibition of technology applications that violate worker’s rights

  • Stopping the tracking organizing activity, or using biased tech such as facial recognition

Establishing guardrails on how employers are using technology

  • Requiring a manager to make their own assessment when an algorithm is suggesting firing or disciplining a worker

Ensuring humans are in the loop

  • Requiring human operators in large trucks, or ensuring that workers can override algorithms they work with

Solutions and actions: WORKER-DRIVEN TECH AND TRAINING

Conference participants talked about strategies to make tech work for workers:

Develop worker created tech

Support tech that makes jobs better

Embrace tech that improves job quality and services, but with guardrails

Focus on training, upskilling, and reskilling programs

Examples:

  • Piloting a digital hiring hall
  • Working with a tech company on training tools
  • Care workers advocating for tech to ensure they get their work hours recorded accurately
  • Teachers excited about the translation capabilities of AI
  • Labor management partnerships that invest in retraining and upskilling
  • Winning retraining in collective bargaining agreements

Closing thoughts from conference participants

“Coming here has… solidified my belief in the strength of the community, of the strength in numbers.” - Heever Rocha, Warehouse Workers Resource Center

“[M]ost of us are actually facing very similar challenges. [S]ince we're all coming together and beginning to voice it out, I think that that's ultimately what's going to help us push forward and possibly make changes.” - Scarlett Gurrola, SEUI Local 221

“[W]e're here today to pool our knowledge, but to also come together as a movement so that we can have some common-sense guardrails and regulation and really build a movement that is taking on tech as a tool of employers.” - Sara Flocks, California Federation of Labor Unions

Credits:

Photos by Brooke Anderson