In the shadow of Silicon Valley, workers for the city of Oakland, California, worry the region will deploy AI systems that could increase surveillance and inaccurately evaluate their performance. Pushing for protections to ensure workers won’t be laid off or disciplined by AI, their union overwhelmingly voted on 22 October to authorize a strike, with 94.1% in favor.
“We just want the city administration to really be intentional about how it’s engaging with AI products,” said Julian Ware, an Oakland spatial data administrator and member of International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers Local 21. “Sometimes with a fancy new toy, it actually costs more, it’s more difficult to implement and the results are not as good.”
The nearly unanimous vote had an impact. The city government of Oakland and the union reached a tentative, three-year agreement that includes AI-related protections, such as requiring the city to retrain or reassign workers displaced by AI rather than firing them. As a result, the 5 November strike has been put on hold.
The Bay Area union is one of many public-sector labor groups nationwide seeking explicit protections against AI and automation, which union representatives say could worsen working conditions and threaten jobs. Following decades of automation efforts by companies and growing concern about AI since ChatGPT’s debut in 2022, ongoing labor disputes reveal hardening battle lines between public-sector bosses and their increasingly vocal workers.
“The bosses have such zeal for use of this technology,” said John Samuelsen, the Transport Workers Union president and a New York City subway track inspector. “Our members know that automation is the ultimate threat to their jobs … In transport, it’s here, it’s in our faces, we’re fighting it every day.”
Over the past few years, AI and automation technologies have infiltrated multiple sectors and are gradually making their way into public-sector workplaces across the country. Already, nearly 70% of state and local government agencies say they have adopted or are implementing generative AI, according to a survey by Ernst and Young conducted from July to August 2026. At the same time, workers are organizing and starting to win protections.
Policy makers have been moving too slowly to address AI’s potential effects on workers, so workers have to fight for themselves, argues Liz Shuler, AFL-CIO president and founder of its Technology Institute. “We’re using our contract negotiations to institute guardrails that policymakers won’t.”
Some unions have been prepared for this moment, having watched private-sector unions fight similar battles, said Kung Feng, a researcher with the University of California at Berkeley’s Labor Center and former director of San Francisco Jobs With Justice. For example, in 2023, Communications Workers of America recommended AI protections, and won some of them for California workers in October 2026.
“Workers versus billionaires has been the theme of this whole election … and bargain cycle,” Feng said. “This is the contest that we have over the future of technology in the workplace.”
Pushing back on AI
Researchers call it bossware: AI tools that public- and private-sector employers are increasingly rolling out across industries to monitor and supervise employees, according to an October report Feng co-authored. Some tools rank and evaluate workers for hiring, firing and promotions. Others track location and activity, monitor productivity, scan biometrics for timekeeping, use cameras, wearable devices and sensors, or leverage analytics to predict emotions.
Amazon has used algorithms to push workers to operate at dangerous speeds in its warehouses, and now that strategy is being deployed in the public sector, said Lorena Gonzalez, the California Federation of Labor Unions president.
“We think AI doesn’t belong on big-rig trucks, and it doesn’t belong in hospitals and schools,” Gonzalez said.
Some automation technologies could aid public-sector workers, like vehicle safety systems in public transit, but humans should always be in charge, providing oversight, Gonzalez said. Computers have been able to fly a plane for years, but every aircraft carries two pilots who can use human judgment and skill to override the system when necessary, she said.
“If we’re using a computer or AI, it has to be controlled by a human being, not the other way around,” she said.
Employers in the public sector often deploy automation technologies during claimed attempts to improve efficiency and cut costs when budgets are slim, Feng said. But unions have been pushing for AI protections since the late 2010s, and those battles are only intensifying as automation advances and generative AI becomes more common, he said. Workers’ requests include receiving advance notice before a new technology is rolled out, getting information about that technology and ensuring the right to negotiate over its use, he added.
Examples abound of worker pushback. Last year, Pennsylvania became the first state to run a pilot program with OpenAI. The state encouraged employees, like unemployment claim workers and social workers, to use ChatGPT Enterprise to test for time savings.
“But there were no guarantees or agreements for the workers,” said Steve Catanese, president of Service Employees International Union Local 668, which represents more than 10,000 statewide public-sector workers. “With generative AI, workers are building their own gallows sometimes.”
Then the union spoke up, inspired by the California screenwriters’ victory in 2023, one of the longest strikes in Hollywood history that secured protections against AI replacing writers. The Pennsylvania SEIU Local 668 pushed the governor, Josh Shapiro, to agree to a policy guaranteeing that the state’s use of AI will include employee input and supervision, and that the tech won’t be used to discipline workers.
“It’s powerful for elected leaders to say, there will always be human public servants under my watch,” Catanese said, referring to commitments that AI won’t displace workers. He expects these issues to resurface when the union negotiates for a new contract in 2027.
In transportation, public workers in states including Florida and New York are proactively trying to block Waymo and city governments from deploying autonomous vehicles, calling them unsafe and a threat to their jobs. They’re hoping to replicate a 2024 victory in Columbus, Ohio, where the Transport Workers Union secured contracts giving it veto power over any plan by the Central Ohio Transit Authority to deploy autonomous vehicles.
But the TWU doesn’t oppose new technologies, said Samuelsen, the union president. It supports systems that can aid with collision avoidance and improving bus and train timing, he said.
But he worries that many industries are pushing for AI and automation without regard for safety. For example, some airlines have begun experimenting with using drones to inspect aircraft from afar rather than relying on human jet mechanics, who can do a more thorough, up-close inspection.
AI and automation are “in every single element of passenger transport, and even freight transport, that you can imagine. It has completely infiltrated us,” Samuelsen said. “Where there’s no … union that’s willing to fight, workers are doomed.”
Fighting for themselves
This isn’t the first time emerging technologies have negatively affected labor markets and working conditions across industries, union representatives said.
“We’ve seen this movie before,” Schuler said. Unions have faced mass job loss before, such as when automation in assembly-line factories in the midwest reduced manufacturing jobs, she said.
Some legislators, especially at the state level, have been making strides toward new policies. For example, the IFPTE and other unions supported the No Robo Bosses bill in California, which bars employers from relying solely on automated systems to discipline or fire workers. Unions also supported another California bill that prohibited employers from using workplace AI surveillance tools, such as those that could monitor employees’ emotional states. Gavin Newsom signed both into law on 30 September.
Public-sector workers have also backed AI-related legislation in other states. Public-sector unions in New York supported a law, effective December 2025, that protects workers at state agencies from being displaced by AI.
Though tech CEOs have warned of AI’s hypothetical risks to humanity, the more pressing issue is how employees are being negatively affected by the technology today, said Keith Brown, executive secretary-treasurer of the Alameda Labor Council, which serves public and private-sector workers in California’s Alameda county.
“We’ve seen in the news a lot of headlines about the threat of AI destroying civilization,” Brown said. “But for workers, we’ve been facing these harms from AI tech companies for a long time.”
