Governance & Guardrails: Artificial Intelligence and Low-Wage Workers

Seema N. Patel

This Article examines an important, but undertheorized phenomenon at the intersection of technology and work: the rapidly increasing presence of artificial intelligence systems into low wage workplaces—and decidedly into the lives of low-wage workers themselves—and the resulting broader implications on work law and democracy. For decades, technology has enabled employers to increasingly exert control over workers; but for all their promise, emerging technologies like artificial intelligence also extend a new and potentially harmful level of concern for low-wage workers in particular. From algorithmic software that unilaterally determines workers’ schedules “on demand” and without notice; to constant and often surreptitious surveillance and monitoring of workers’ every move; to the quiet, often invisible collection of workers’ data, AI-powered workplace technologies have, in their quest to maximize productivity, in the process minimized workers’ rights. Absent guardrails to govern their use, these technologies purport to optimize labor while in fact harming low-wage workers and eroding the institution of work.

For the few unionized low-wage workers that enjoy collectively bargained contract provisions, those that expressly address technology in the workplace are beneficial (and instructive). But for the vast majority—the tens of millions of low-wage workers who are not unionized—few legal or regulatory vehicles exist that offer them a voice into, or protection against, how such technologies affect their working conditions or their lives. Where formal labor representation has proved elusive to ninety-four percent of low-wage workers in the private sector, alternate structural formations have emerged that provide low-wage workers with some semblance of collective voice in the workplace: worker centers, community coalitions, and labor-community partnerships. Together these enable a “co-enforcement” model— a formal partnership between government and workers which can help solve for this challenge, and aid in the nascent but growing movement to establish meaningful workplace technology rights.

This Article 1) directly confronts how this new technological paradigm affects the nearly 26 million low-wage workers whose working conditions, livelihoods, and lives are most vulnerable; and 2) enumerates a framework for meaningful governance and guardrails to mitigate harms to low-wage workers caused by employers’ use of these technologies.