How Organized Workers Are Shaping AI Usage

Labor Can Lead on AI

Workers are worried about AI. New polling from NBC News finds that 46 percent of the public holds negative views of AI, and 57 percent believe the risks outweigh the benefits. It’s no surprise, given that tech corporations are funneling billions into new AI technologies without meaningful guardrails or democratic input.

But workers are stepping up, organizing and demonstrating their collective power over these major decisions.

In anew blog post, Alistair Stephenson—chief of strategy at the National Domestic Workers Alliance (NDWA) and a 2025 Reimagine America fellow at Roosevelt—explores different worker-led approaches to AI governance.

• Unions often start by drawing redlines. In 2024, National Nurses United clarified their opposition to the use of “unproven or unsafe AI in clinical settings.” Journalists at the NewsGuild (the union that also represents Roosevelt Institute staff) recently set guidelines for newsrooms demanding that AI not be used to write and publish work without human oversight.
• Workers have also bargained for agency over AI use. The Writers Guild won a contract after striking in 2023 stating that screenwriters, not studios, decide whether and how to use AI in their projects.
• Some workers are co-creating their own tools. The National Education Association has created resource and instructional guides on evaluating the quality of AI tools, and the NDWA has created large language models that can help workers search their workplace rights and get multilingual writing assistance.

“Workers are not uniformly fearful of the technology itself,” Stephenson writes. “Many see practical upside in tools that reduce repetitive tasks, ease burnout, or expand access to knowledge.” He adds, “What they resist is unilateral deployment. They do not want AI introduced without input into how it shapes their workload, safety, evaluation, or pay.”

Read the blog post: A Call for Proactive, Worker-Powered AI Governance

What We’re Talking About

What We’re Reading

• Trump’s attacks on Iran are roiling the global economy. Amid weak job growth and fluctuating oil prices, some analysts are warning of the possibility of “stagflation”—the combination of high unemployment, high inflation, and no growth. But it’s too soon to tell if inflation will actually be extreme. “This is probably just going to slow the economy down, rather than trigger some long wave of inflation,” Roosevelt’s principal economist, Michael Madowitz, told Axios.
  • Madowitz wrote about the shock to oil supply on Bluesky: “There are strategic concerns that should govern how much energy we pull out of the ground, how much we store, and how much we ship out. These national strategy questions are a bad fit with outsourcing energy policy to companies required to maximize short-term shareholder value.”
  • Read more on energy price volatility:
    • Entrenched Power: How Shareholder-Owned Electric Utilities Hinder the Clean Energy Transition
    • Fossil Fuel–Driven Price Volatility Demonstrates the Need for a Renewable Transition
• People with million-dollar salaries have stopped paying into Social Security for the year. Yes, you read that right. The Social Security payroll tax is capped at $184,000 of earnings, meaning that those who make $1 million in yearly income will no longer be contributing for 2026.
  • CNBC cited Roosevelt research on the Social Security trust fund shortfall: Because of rising inequality, the amount of untaxed income from the wealthiest Americans has only grown over recent decades.
  • Read more on strengthening Social Security: “Will Social Security Run Out?” Is the Wrong Question: How Lawmakers Can Protect Beneficiaries and Strengthen OASI
• NAFTA shortened workers’ lifespans. US communities most impacted by the trade deal and its resulting job losses lost a year of remaining life expectancy, according to a new study covered by the New York Times.
  • “The paper will have particular importance over the next few months,” Roosevelt’s Todd N. Tucker wrote on Bluesky, “as policymakers decide whether to renew or seek changes to the USMCA, which replaced NAFTA.”
• Live music will stay a luxury, for now. The Department of Justice moved to settle its antitrust case against Ticketmaster parent company Live Nation, which will allow the company to keep prices high through exorbitant fees and maintain its monopoly on the ticket selling market.
  • “Behavioral remedies (i.e., settlements) are, in most instances, designed to fail,” Roosevelt President and CEO Elizabeth Wilkins wrote on Bluesky. “We have to get at the heart of the structural problem—the monopoly power this company wields.”