Healthcare workers are using AI on the job to improve diagnostic accuracy
A quiet shift is taking place inside unions across the country. Staff members are using generative AI tools to research issues, draft communications, support members, and run their organizations. Some unions have written staff policies and are deciding, case by case, whether to subscribe to commercial platforms, partner with technology companies, or develop tools of their own.
Labor’s response so far reflects the movement’s breadth. The AFL-CIO has formed a partnership with Microsoft. The building trades, one of labor’s most politically powerful blocs, see data centers as the largest construction opportunity in a generation, creating work for electricians, laborers, pipefitters, and operating engineers. Some have partnered with technology companies on that buildout while opposing efforts that could slow it.
Other unions have emphasized the risks. Creative-industry unions such as SAG-AFTRA and IATSE have bargained for protections against the loss of jobs and creative control. Healthcare workers are demanding guardrails against AI-driven surveillance and unsafe automation. Still others have raised legitimate concerns about the health and environmental costs data centers impose on workers and surrounding communities.
These positions are not contradictory. They reflect a basic truth: technology can create opportunity, concentrate power, or do both at once.
Too much of the labor movement, however, remains in a familiar defensive posture. Some unions avoid taking a position on tools their own staff already use, treating new technology only as a threat to manage rather than a capability to master. The instinct is understandable. For generations, employers have deployed technology to monitor workers, eliminate jobs, weaken bargaining power, and frustrate organizing.
But abstaining does not stop technological change. It simply leaves the rules to other people.
I spent much of the 2010s moving between the technology and labor worlds, learning the intricacies of their sharply different attitudes toward innovation and economic growth. When I launched UnionBase at the Lean Startup Conference in 2015, after years of helping workers use technology in large-scale organizing campaigns, our goal was to create a place where people could connect with unions without fear of intimidation or retaliation.
At the time, I thought I was building a national organizing platform. In practice, I was also making an argument: working people deserve to understand, master, and help govern the technology of their era—rather than merely absorbing its consequences.
In hundreds of meetings with unions across the country, my team and I repeatedly encountered a divide between leaders who saw little reason to invest in new organizing technology and younger members who lived much of their lives online. Public support for unions has grown substantially, especially among young workers, yet there is still no central place for an American worker who wants a union to begin organizing or seek representation.
Organizing is the labor movement’s engine of growth, but unions have often invested more heavily in electoral power than in the technology needed to reach and organize workers at scale. That imbalance is increasingly costly. Workers now find jobs, build communities, exchange information, and experience workplace surveillance through digital systems. A movement that cannot meet them in those systems risks losing both relevance and power.
Some unions are showing what a different approach can accomplish. Teamsters Local 856 in Northern California has grown its membership by 52 percent since 2020 by integrating bargaining, organizing, legal, communications, and political strategy—and using modern software to support the whole operation. UnionBase worked with SEIU Wisconsin to engage members digitally as nurses organized for safe staffing, culminating in the first strike in a Madison hospital’s history. The Progressive Workers Union, which I co-founded, used online organizing to expand across the nonprofit sector and helped spark interest among a new generation of workers. Meanwhile, technologists are beginning to build AI tools specifically for workers.
Software alone cannot rebuild labor. Leadership, solidarity, and face-to-face organizing remain indispensable. But technology can help organizers identify demand, communicate across distance, preserve institutional knowledge, and respond to workers at a scale that traditional methods alone cannot match. Innovation and organizing are most powerful when they reinforce each other.
Unions should therefore build technological capacity as deliberately as they build legal, political, and bargaining capacity. That means training staff and members to understand how AI systems work; setting clear rules for privacy, security, and human oversight; bargaining over workplace deployment before harmful practices become entrenched; investing in tools designed around worker needs; and ensuring workers have a voice wherever new technologies are financed, built, and governed.
AI is only one part of this challenge. Financial technology and digital assets are already moving money through new systems and serving real-world uses. Because these tools combine technological and financial power, their rules will affect how workers are paid, how organizations raise and move money, and who controls the infrastructure beneath the economy. Labor cannot afford to enter those debates only after the rules have been written.
Without worker voices, emerging technologies will advance according to the priorities of the companies and investors that control them, and labor will inherit systems it never helped shape. The technology industry often tunes labor out when opposition is all it hears. Unions must be ready to object when technology harms workers, but also to propose, build, bargain, and govern.
Control increasingly belongs to those who understand the tools of their time. If labor wants power in the economy of the future, it must join the forces shaping those tools from the beginning.
*Larry Williams Jr. is the founder of UnionBase and policy director at Open Frontier.*