This event is put on by members of the Education Committee and does not necessarily represent the views of the WMALF or AFL-CIO. We encourage Union members to engage with each other on a wide range of topics, including those which have a range of views in the Labor Movement.

The Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research (DAIR) Initiative (Oakland, CA), the DePaul University Labor Education Center (Chicago, IL), and the UC San Diego Labor Center (San Diego, CA), in partnership with Cedric de Leon at the UMass Amherst Labor Center, seek to advance an alternative agenda on Artificial Intelligence for the U.S. labor movement. 

The AFL-CIO recently signaled that it will partner with tech giants like Microsoft to mitigate the devastating effects of the industry on workers. Likewise, the AFT announced a partnership with OpenAI on incorporating AI in the classroom – this despite the fact that OpenAI and its contractors are among the most egregious violators of worker rights both in the United States and abroad. 

To counter this push toward collaboration, we intend to persuade workers, union staff, and leadership of a different approach: one that advocates for resistance to the AI hype and a revival of the old idea of industrial democracy. The idea is to advance the talking points of this agenda through various methods of political education and in doing so counter the impulse to collaborate with people and corporations who want to undermine the power of organized labor through a system of temporary, badly paid, and highly exploitative jobs.

To that end, we are asking labor organizations across the country to attend a pilot of our two-hour training. The goal of the pilot is to collect feedback that we will use to make the training more engaging, at which point we will roll the training out to to the wider labor movement  The two-hour pilot training will consist of four parts:

1. A brief informational session on how AI is currently being used in the workplace;

2. Small group discussion and report back in which leadership, staff, and/or rank and file share their own experience of AI in the workplace;

3. A bargaining simulation in which participants attempt to negotiate AI language with a school district; and

4. A debrief for collecting feedback on the training.  

We have already conducted the very first pilot at the national Jobs with Justice conference in Atlanta in May 2026. We received very positive feedback, but we would like to collect more input before sharing the training with the wider labor movement.