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collective bargaining
Bargaining to Save Our Jobs from Artificial Intelligence
There is broad and deep recognition that AI technology will reshape the future of work, and unions have decided to roll up their sleeves (and dust off their picket signs) to bargain how AI will be implemented, to do what, and to what effect.
May 07, 2026
For many pundits and policymakers, there is little doubt that Artificial Intelligence will devour the jobs of millions of people, including professionals formerly presumed immune to technological replacement. The only question is how many jobs will be lost, how quickly. In fact, there is nothing inevitable about AI—not its development, its deployment, or its impact. Massive job losses are not inherent in the algorithm, preordained by the laws of nature and physics. Rather than remaining struck by awe, we can reassert human agency over this technology. We can not only save jobs, but perhaps even make them better.
AI is not an abstract force that operates solely at the macroeconomic level. AI systems and agents are developed and implemented in ways specific to each sector, each workplace, each type of job. Although employers might focus myopically on cutting their wage bill, their employees know firsthand how the work actually gets done. They know what disclosures to request about how the technology would be used. They know how AI might affect the content and flow of their work, what training would be most helpful, and which implementations would be most likely to devalue their labor versus those most likely to enhance it. Thus, the most effective way to ensure that AI makes work life better and not worse is to empower workers to bargain about it.
By “workers” I mean people who rely on their own labor to earn a living—which is to say, most of us, whether we write reports, treat patients, teach kids, manufacture products, or stock warehouses. AI is not something that’s going to happen only to other people; it will affect all of us.
Workers need the authority and the power to bargain about the implementation of AI in the workplace, not just the effects. “Effects bargaining” is the traditional approach: After a technology has wiped out jobs, people negotiate a little severance pay to tide them over, and maybe some training for completely different jobs, if any such jobs exist. By contrast, our goal should be to make sure workers can negotiate for technology that makes their jobs better, more productive, more valuable. To avoid the car crash in the first place, if you will, and not just to apportion damages afterward.
AI will not destroy or devalue our jobs by itself, unless we let it.
One can imagine some objections to this approach. Some people might insist that AI is in irresistible force, that large-scale job destruction is inevitable, and that our task is to figure out other things for people to do to earn a living—or, if that’s not possible, to pay them a small stipend so they don’t starve. This defeatism is a short step away from the more nihilistic vision of the pure doomers, who think it might already be too late to save humanity from machine-led destruction. I love science fiction myself—but it is fiction, not history.
Another objection might be that placing restraints of any kind on AI companies in the United States will keep the industry from winning the global race for dominance. This is the Trump administration’s view. This logic is inverted. Nations should be governed for the benefit of their people, not just their Big Tech companies. Both the Republican and Democratic parties proclaim themselves to be the champions of the American worker. If so, the real triumph for the nation would be to ensure that technology enhances work and makes working people’s lives better, not to create havoc and economic devastation across the labor market.
Some might object that it is unrealistic to think that working people have the interest or ability to intervene effectively, to exercise their right to bargain about AI technology. But that is exactly what has been happening in the entertainment industry. One of the central issues in the 2023 strike by the Writers Guild of America against the Hollywood studios and producers was the use of AI in writers’ workplaces. The Guild represents the professionals who create scripts for TV and streaming series and for feature films. In late 2022 Open AI revealed that ChatGPT could write—coherently and at some length. Although the union did not conclude that robots had suddenly become capable of crafting award-winning scripts, Guild members recognized that their employers could use AI to do just enough to degrade and devalue their work.
During contract talks in 2023 the Guild proposed—and won, after a five-month strike—language that puts meaningful guardrails on the use of AI. These guardrails reflect the process writers and studios actually use to create characters and stories and full-length projects. They ensure that AI cannot be used to deprive writers of the opportunity to do the full range of writing work, and they deprive employers of the economic incentive to replace professional writers with algorithms. Guild members knew how to defend their careers, and they fought for meaningful protections.
The Guild members’ willingness to take on the AI issue, rather than passively accept that the technology would hollow out their careers, resonated with working people everywhere. The actors’ union (SAG AFTRA) also struck and won contract protections on AI, and the following year the other entertainment industry unions did the same. The entire labor movement has made workplace AI a top priority. There is broad and deep recognition that AI technology will reshape the future of work, and unions have decided to roll up their sleeves (and dust off their picket signs) to bargain how AI will be implemented, to do what, to what effect.
AI systems do not develop themselves; AI companies do. AI does not implement itself in the workplace; employers do. AI will not destroy or devalue our jobs by itself, unless we let it. Working people can and must protect their livelihoods by bargaining over AI implementation. Nothing less than the future of work is at stake.
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Trump Is Telling All The Wrong People, 'You're Fired' and Devastating America
Entire careers and livelihoods have been destroyed by this dictator using the White House to vastly enrich himself and his cronies.
Apr 26, 2026
On my radio show-podcast—the Ralph Nader Radio Hour—interviews of knowledgeable people have detailed the ravages by the cruel, serial law violator, Tyrant Trump, inflicted on millions of Americans. Still, the report from the V-Dem Institute at Sweden’s University of Gothenburg produced a jolting Common Dreams headline: 'Trump is Dismantling US Democracy at a Speed ‘Unprecedented in Modern History.’"
The report described the first year of President Donald Trump’s second term as achieving in one year what budding autocracies take a decade to accomplish, adding that “the speed of decline is comparable to some coups d’état.”
To wreck, weaken, and endanger our country, Trump disrupts the lives of millions of civil servants, contractors, small businesses, and their families. He fired or forced out hundreds of thousands of federal civil servants staffing programs that protect the health, safety, and economic well-being of tens of millions of Americans, relying on food supplements, Medicaid, government-backed loans, and innumerable other social safety nets.
Trump has especially targeted law enforcement programs directed at enforcing worker and consumer safety, financial protections, and environmental health against toxic corporations. He is taking federal cops off the corporate crime beat.
Multiply this story of undeserved misery and fragility hundreds of thousands of times.
Here are some specifics. Qualified foreign doctors have had their visas rejected. The US has a doctor shortage, especially in rural areas. These physicians were blocked by Trump from extending care in areas with no doctors.
Huge, arbitrary cuts for scientific research have closed or curtailed labs, left individual scientists pursuing crucial discoveries to save lives without the government grants funding vital promising projects. He has also accelerated a brain drain from the US to Europe and China, and reduced the number of scientists, engineers, and nurses coming to the US to work, where they are seriously needed.
Entire careers and livelihoods have been destroyed by this dictator using the White House to vastly enrich himself and his cronies.
Let’s be more specific. The New York Times published a front-page story about what is happening to employees of the US Agency for International Development (USAID), illegally closed down in the first week of Trump’s regime. This reckless action jeopardizes millions of impoverished lives abroad. The article opened with: “She was fired by email while on maternity leave, given 24 hours to clear out her desk, and left with three days of health insurance and no severance.” Her husband, also working with funding from USAID, lost his job. They are now relying on food stamps, Medicaid, and a supplemental nutrition program—long-standing programs being cravenly slashed by the Trumpsters, while giving huge tax escapes to the super rich and large corporations like Apple.
Multiply this story of undeserved misery and fragility hundreds of thousands of times. Through Elon Musk’s criminal enterprise, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), whole agencies were being illegally shattered, and virtually shut down, e.g., the Department of Education, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and the US Institute of Peace. Others were being strip-mined like the Department of Health and Human Services, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Department of Agriculture.
Trump tore up civil service union contracts. The unions are suing Trump for this breach of contract. Such lawsuits drag on interminably and are hardly covered by the media. What the union leaders and members should be doing is peaceably encircling the White House for round-the-clock vigils and featuring large signs calling Trump out in vivid language. After all, the headquarters of the AFL-CIO is less than a block from the White House for easy logistics.
What are the pretexts coming out of Trump’s snarling mouth to justify such devastation of America? One is that he accuses these agencies of being “woke,” an ill-defined word for “leftists” that he has turned into another of his four-letter epithets for his ever-true believers.
A more frequent declaration issued without substantiation is that his decisions are based on “a grave threat to national security.” His lies don’t pass the laugh test.
This pretext is always applied to Trump’s blockage of offshore wind turbines, which he strangely has long called “ugly.” Trump recently exempted oil and gas drilling in the Gulf of Mexico from measures to protect endangered species. Self-described warrior of God and Jesus Christ, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, stated that such exemptions would bolster national security by increasing domestic oil production.
Trumpian effrontery gets worse. He issued an executive order removing collective bargaining rights from hundreds of thousands of federal employees employed by a dozen agencies on national security grounds. The 1978 law he falsely invoked applied to “intelligence officers,” not to cleaners, guards, clerks, etc., in federal buildings. Again, the expected lawsuits were filed. Amid judicial delays, Trump gets his way.
When pressed by reporters to explain these pretexts, Trump’s flaks come up with ridiculous assertions promptly rebutted by specialists in each area. (See The New York Times, April 19, 2026—“Trump Has a Go-To Justification for His Contentious Decisions: National Security.”)
Who elected Trump? The Democratic Party’s feeble, cowardly, and uninspiring performance in 2024—repressing through its corporate-conflicted consultants’ decisive input from its progressive wing and civic and labor leaders—was a big factor. (See the August 27, 2024, letter to Liz Shuler).
Who unleashed this runaway felonious politician violating daily innumerable federal laws, regulations, international treaties, and constitutional provisions, constituting serious impeachable offenses? (See H.Res.1155).
First, the congressional Republicans have abjectly surrendered their oath of office to constitutionally lead the congressional branch of government. In addition, the cowardly Democrats, who could have conducted scores of “shadow hearings” to inform the media and citizenry are largely MIA.
It is time for citizens to press their Senators and Representatives to stop this Trump rampage—before it is too late. The Congressional Switchboard number is 202-224-3121.
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America Runs on Care Work, and I’m Tired of Pretending Otherwise
The labor that sustains human life gets pushed to the margins, while the labor that scales software gets paraded on magazine covers.
Mar 08, 2026
A few days ago, I stared at a federal bar chart on my laptop and felt my stomach drop. I started asking people a party-trick question: What’s the biggest occupation in America? Almost everyone guessed something visible: teachers, retail, fast food, office work. That’s what our culture trains us to notice.
Then I pulled up the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ (BLS) “largest occupations” data, and the answer was sitting there in plain English: Home Health and Personal Care Aides, 3,988,140 people.
I’m not reading that as an abstract statistic but something I see daily through my work in running CareYaya, a social enterprise that helps families find affordable in-home care support. I hear the voices behind those numbers every day: the exhausted daughter trying to keep her job, the older man determined to stay in his own house, the care aide who shows up anyway even when her own life is fraying.
What hit me wasn’t just the size of the workforce, but the silence with which society treats caregivers.
Care work sits at the intersection of everything America avoids looking at directly: aging, disability, dependence, death, and the truth that every “independent” adult is one accident, cancer, or dementia diagnosis away from needing help.
In a country that can’t stop talking about “the economy,” I rarely see the economy described the way it actually functions at street level. I see caregivers keeping older adults safe so that family members can work, so the bills get paid, so other industries keep humming. I see care work acting like the hidden scaffolding under everything else.
And, I see how quickly that scaffolding gets treated as disposable labor.
When I talk to families, they often whisper about their difficulties getting care support almost like they’re confessing a moral failure. “We’re trying,” they tell me, as if the need for help is some private weakness instead of a predictable part of aging or serious illness. When I talk to care aides, they talk about the stress from the care work. They talk about rushing between clients. They talk about loving the work and sometimes still not being able to make rent.
PHI’s snapshot of the direct care workforce puts numbers to what I keep hearing, that median annual earnings for direct care workers were just $25,015. I read that figure and think about what it really means in 2026 America: The largest job category in the nation is, effectively, a low-wage backbone.
I also think about who gets stuck holding the bag. Care work is still treated as “women’s work” in the cultural imagination, and that bias leaks into policy, pay, and prestige. I watch the same pattern repeat: The labor that sustains human life gets pushed to the margins, while the labor that scales software gets paraded on magazine covers.
What makes me angrier is that this isn’t a small sector we can ignore until later. The BLS projects 17% growth from 2024 to 2034 for home health and personal care aides, with about 765,800 openings each year on average. This is not a “future” problem but rather a present problem that is going to grow much worse, faster.
And yet I keep watching public conversations drift toward fantasy. I hear endless speculation about AI replacing workers, while the largest workforce in America can’t even get a stable ladder, a living wage, or basic respect. I hear investors pitch “aging tech” like it’s a consumer gadget category, while the core issue is whether a real human being can afford to do this work and stay in it.
I don’t think this is an accident, but rather, a choice embedded in our system.
Care work sits at the intersection of everything America avoids looking at directly: aging, disability, dependence, death, and the truth that every “independent” adult is one accident, cancer, or dementia diagnosis away from needing help. So we do what societies often do with uncomfortable truths. We outsource them, we underpay them, and we call them “personal responsibility.”
Even the funding structure says it all. Medicaid is the main payer of long-term services and supports in the US, and a recent Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services brief says so plainly: “Medicaid is the largest payer for long-term services and supports (LTSS) in the United States.” I read that line and think about the whiplash families face when they confront a vast public health need paired with political rhetoric that treats caregivers and recipients like line items to be squeezed.
So when I’m asked what to do, I start with a moral stance and then I get practical.
I want a country that pays the people who keep elders safe, like they truly matter. I want Medicaid rates and payment models that stop forcing providers into churn, and stop forcing workers into poverty. I want training and advancement pathways for care workers, and I want the caregiving workforce to have real power: bargaining power, scheduling power, and dignity at work.
I also want us to stop acting surprised when the care workforce pipeline breaks. If the biggest job in America is care, then the “care crisis” isn’t a niche issue, but a core labor rights issue; a public investment issue; and an economic issue that’s as critical as housing, wages, and healthcare.
When I look back at that BLS bar chart, I don’t see a pop-quiz type question anymore. I see millions of workers holding up millions of families. I see the work that makes the rest of American life possible.
And I can’t unsee the insult of how little we talk about it.
If I want anything from readers, it’s this: I want you to say the name of the job out loud, and then demand that we build an economy that treats it as essential, because it is.
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