“Currently, it is a common tactic for employers to slow-walk the bargaining process because there are no penalties for doing so, and delay frustrates workers and undermines their union,” the Economic Policy Institute explains.

It’s not hard to imagine why: A recent report from the Economic Policy Institute found that tripling union membership could significantly raise wages across the workforce, giving the median worker a 14.5% raise, or the equivalent of more than $7,700 per year. Over the course of a year, workers could stand to gain $1.2 trillion. For decades, worker productivity has far outpaced wage growth—a clear sign that workers don’t benefit from individual bargaining nearly as much as they might assume.

There are higher stakes for federal agencies compared with private companies when it comes to AI implementation, Zipperer contended, because improper usage could lead to individuals losing their benefits or shaky legal justifications for government actions. Unlike in the private sector, however, the economist emphasized that there isn’t a market factor in government to push back on poor AI implementation. 

“A private sector company could replace all their workers with AI, but then their product quality would probably suffer, and they’ll lose sales. But there’s no profitability check on the public sector,” he said. “So if the public sector uses AI as a way or an excuse to make public servants’ jobs worse or to cut public services, there’s not a non-political check on that, and public services just suffer.” 

VALERIE WILSON: Yeah, this is really a reversal of 60 years of the EEOC’s history and mission in enforcing anti-discrimination law, specifically anti-discrimination in employment law in this country. The big news is about the EE01 form, which is required by private employers with 100 or more employees and federal contractors with 50 or more employees.

But they actually voted to rescind all of the data collection. So that would also include employment data from state and local government, as well as elementary and secondary public schools and local labor unions. So it’s not just the EE01, they voted to rescind all of the data collection efforts that, again, have been in place for 60 years in order to support their role in enforcing Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits employment discrimination on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, national origin, and a number of other protected classes.