How Labor Movements May Help Rebalance Power in the Technology Sector

Rutgers researchers explore how worker coalitions can influence the development of AI, and press policymakers toward more people-centered governance.

Wide swathes of American workers are more meaningfully involved than in the past in organizing around and pushing back against artificial intelligence (AI) and data-driven technologies in the workplace, a Rutgers study has found.

Rutgers researchers examined the 2023 contract for the labor union Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA). Their research highlights strategies for workers to use to push back through forming workers collectives around technology, developing more people-centered policies and forging solidarities with transnational labor.

"This study contributes an understanding of how labor can intervene into the unbridled hype around AI to develop formal and informal labor policies and discourse," said Emma May,a doctoral student attending the Rutgers School of Communication and Informationand lead author of the study.

Britt Paris, an associate professor of library and information science in the School of Communication and Information coauthored the study, "Dis/engaging the 'common sense' of AI: Labor strategies from the 2023 SAG-AFTRA around data-driven technologies," published in Big Data & Society.

The 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike took place outside of major film studios and streaming company offices located primarily in Los Angeles, California and New York City from July 14 - Nov. 9, 2023. On Dec. 5, 2023, SAG-AFTRA members voted to ratifya television and theatrical agreement with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers.

The 118-day workers strike, according to SAG-AFTRA, enabled its negotiating committee "to secure over $1 billion in gains, along with the union's first-ever protections around AI technology."

To collect data for the study, the authors combined policy and discourse analysis to compare language in union communication, official documents and policies as well as news coverage of the strike and the union and its activities around AI.

The authors found that a prevailing "common sense" perception of AI, created by technology companies and the news media to "portray AI's impacts on all aspects of everyday life as a given - a foregone conclusion," had a significant impact on the bargaining contracts during the SAG-AFTRA strike.

Further, the authors found that AI isn't simply a "common sense" foregone conclusion: It "also obfuscates large-scale, transnational coordination of resources, labor, and people who make up the infrastructures that are required for artificial intelligence. This matters because it broadens the base for possible coalition building."

Drawing from science and technology studies, social movement literature and critical studies of technology, May and Paris developed a spectrum of engagement - ranging from engagement to disengagement - around the "common sense" rhetoric that the impact of AI on workers and jobs is inevitable and unavoidable.

May and Paris then examined discourse around the SAG-AFTRA contract through the lens of the spectrum and discussed the ambiguity of AI as a subject of bargaining under current U.S. labor law.

Paris said the process clarified how "these negotiations exist in a difficult context, because there is little protective state or federal regulation around AI for workers."

She added there are "massive issues" around consent, compensation for intellectual property and likeness concerns, radicalized image-based pay discrimination and popularized pervading sentiment that AI is inevitable, which "puts labor in a weaker position to address AI than is necessary."

May and Paris also found that current labor organizing around AI is "constrained by AI's ambiguous status as a subject of bargaining." The authors stressed the importance of defining AI and technology "more broadly as permissive subjects of bargaining so that workers can have more say with regard to tech deployment in the workplace."

Looking ahead to labor's continued or initial ability to protect workers in the age of AI, May and Paris wrote, "Organized labor might provide pathways to push for reconfiguration in the form of workers collectives to control technology development and deployment within and across localized contexts, as well as both within and across formal union locals and industrial and white-collar sectors and possibly forge solidarities with transnational labor.

"In the future, this activity might create the political conditions to diminish the power of tech firms, and push policymakers to develop better people-centered policies that affect and support those who are not involved in organized labor. But for this to work, organized labor must rise to the moment and take its power seriously."