Not long ago, the National Eating Disorders Association (NEDA) summarily dismissed the staff of its helpline after members tried to organize a union. Managers at the nonprofit then tried to replace the helpline with an AI-powered chatbot, according to an account by Abbie Harper for NPQ, one of the leaders of the unionization effort and the opposition to AI.

This was hardly an isolated incident amid the breakneck integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into the workplace. Ominous signs abound, from the news editor at a nonprofit news site who used AI to edit stories and then fired a reporter for raising objections, to Salesforce’s cutting 4,000 customer support jobs and shifting to AI agents.

Recent developments suggest that the labor movement is starting to take a more active and adversarial approach toward AI in the workplace.

However, the incident at NEDA captures two stark realities of the current economic and technological moment: an enthusiastic and essentially unregulated embrace of AI on the part of employers on the one hand; and a weak labor movement and opposition to AI on the other. Will this dynamic bring about a labor resurgence? It was, after all, an earlier fight for worker dignity amid rapid technological change—the Industrial Revolution—that brought the union movement into existence more than a century ago.

Recent developments suggest that the labor movement is starting to take a more active and adversarial approach toward AI in the workplace, going beyond the Hollywood strike in 2023, when unions representing writers and actors won concessions from major studios limiting how AI can be used to augment or supplant their work.

“The topic of AI and other digital technologies are showing up in contract fights and organizing campaigns, increasingly in public policy debates across a variety of sectors,” Lisa Kresge, senior researcher at UC Berkeley’s Labor Center, told NPQ. “It really has in the last few years been at an inflection point, which reflects where we are in the moment of AI, as well as where unions are in recognizing the potential threat of AI.”

Read the full article about AI and the U.S. labor movement by Ted Siefer at Nonprofit Quarterly.