Posts tagged AI
Professor Claude? College unions negotiate for protection against AI teachers and evaluators.
September 25, 2026 // Research universities, like Pitt and Carnegie Mellon University, have especially embraced AI as both an area of study and a resource to be mined. The two local schools have hosted notable industry gatherings around innovation, and their respective presidents each tout the tech’s capabilities. “We’ve seen a pretty rapid effort by universities to adopt AI tools, and with, I would say, much more kind of inconsistent thinking and policy development about guardrails and protections for how those AI tools might impact academic work at universities,” said Tyler Bickford, president of Pitt’s faculty union.
What good is a nurse’s union that spends nurses’ money to make their jobs harder?
September 23, 2026 // They coordinated the protests to demand that hospitals cancel contracts with Palantir, whose systems help schedule staff, manage records, and cut the administrative load that burns people out. The union marched its members into the street to stop hospitals from adopting tools that could put their members back at the bedside, in the roles they had trained for. The same pattern is appearing wherever new tools threaten a dues structure. When the International Longshoremen’s Association went to the bargaining table, it passed over retraining and a share of the gains from a more productive port. It instead demanded an absolute ban on automated cranes and gates and was prepared to choke the country’s supply chain to get it.
New York’s LOADinG Act: Protecting Public-Sector Jobs from AI
September 16, 2026 // New York’s Legislative Oversight of Automated Decision-Making in Government Act, commonly known as the LOADinG Act, provides an early and revealing example of this tension.[1] Introduced as a framework for governing the use of automated decision-making systems in state government, it paired AI accountability and transparency requirements with extensive employment protections for public-sector workers. As enacted, it prohibited state agencies from using automated systems in ways that displace employees, transfer duties performed by workers, reduce compensation, or alter certain workplace arrangements. Those prohibitions now bind most of the state’s public employers, and the accountability requirements have since been repealed.
150 Allina Health doctors start four-day strike after contract negotiations fail
September 15, 2026 // Allina is also in the midst of a hospice nurses strike that began Friday and will last through the week. Sutter Health, a California-based health nonprofit, says it is planning to acquire Allina Health in a deal that was announced in March.
Commentary:Teamsters built union on innovation but now they’re suing to stop it
August 29, 2026 // Founded between 1901 and 1903, the original Teamsters organization protected the interests of horse-drawn carriage drivers. Early in their history, members faced a new technology that threatened to make their horse-centric skills obsolete: the automobile. Despite the challenges presented by motorized transport, the early Teamsters did not fight the innovation. Instead, they organized around its adoption, expanding their membership categories to include car drivers, retraining horse-team drivers, and helping write the new rules of the road for the automotive future. They changed their name in 1909, adding “Chauffeurs, Stablemen and Helpers” to signify the adaptation to the societal changes driven by technological progress. The Teamsters own founding story provides a strong case study in organized labor adoption and shaping a technological transition rather than resisting it.
Uber drivers won a 12-year fight to unionize. Robots have already taken the wheel
August 19, 2026 // It’s a real victory for their cause, but in the years since drivers began organizing, the ride-hail industry has entered a new era. Robotaxis, once a bug-faced curiosity(opens in new tab), are shaping up to be an existential threat to human rideshare drivers. Experts disagree on the pace and scale of the labor transition, and policymakers are crafting regulations that may bear down on the autonomous vehicle industry. However, there are some warning signs in early-adopter cities. In San Francisco, Uber saw utilization and hourly earnings decline in 2025, it says.
New Jersey employers face evolving union negotiations
August 11, 2026 // New Jersey’s worker-protection laws add further complexity. “When worker-protection laws are enacted or amended in New Jersey, they add layers to collective bargaining,” Gonzalez said. “There’s no requirement to bargain over a law’s implementation, but where statutes are ambiguous, employers must negotiate the gaps.” She pointed to CREAMMA [the state’s Cannabis Regulatory, Enforcement Assistance, and Marketplace Modernization Act] as an example. “The law prohibits adverse action based on cannabis use outside of work,” she noted. “But unionized employers still need to address how drug testing, safety policies, and fitness-for-duty standards interact with the CBA.” Benefits like paid sick leave and NJ WARN Act severance can also stack on top of contractual obligations. “That dual obligation can catch employers off guard if they are not planning for it at the bargaining table,” she detailed.
Commentary: When driverless vehicles are attacked, look for the union label
August 10, 2026 // The news website TechCrunch has reported that CARS is registered to an employee of Pitta Bishop & Del Giorno LLC, a labor-side lobbying and government affairs outfit with offices in New York and DC. The firm’s clients include the Amalgamated Transit Union, the Transport Workers Union, the Transportation Communication Union, and the Garage Employees Union, among other labor groups. The unions likely oppose driverless vehicles because you cannot unionize machines. (Not yet, anyway. Perhaps we shouldn’t be giving them ideas.) They may also be trying to protect traditional cab drivers and city bus drivers, who are often unionized, from competition from the new technology. Never mind that driverless vehicles will provide new options for DC residents, who can’t always get cabs or buses when they need them.
Opinion: Sneaky new teachers’ union plan to indoctrinate our kids: classroom AI
August 3, 2026 // Their objective is to indoctrinate, not educate. That misguided mission is largely to blame for the past decade of drastic learning loss in K-12 schools: Too much indoctrination, too little emphasis on the basics of math and reading. It’s a bad omen for our country.
Senate committee advances Sonderling’s labor nomination
July 31, 2026 // U.S. senators voted on Thursday to advance the nomination of Keith Sonderling, President Donald Trump’s pick to lead the U.S. Department of Labor. Lawmakers on the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committee, in a 12-11 vote, advanced Sonderling’s nomination to lead the Labor Department. The former secretary, Lori Chavez-deRemer, stepped down due to accusations of an improper relationship with a subordinate.