Opinion | Tech Workers Have Fears About A.I., Too. They Can Do Something About It.

Turning those frustrations into sustained organization requires grappling with legal obstacles. Unlike in much of Western Europe, where workers are unionized at high levels and can bargain as an entire sector to address problems in their industries, in the United States the legal system makes organizing and bargaining exceedingly difficult. The National Labor Relations Act, the federal law that governs organizing and bargaining among private sector workers, promises to protect the right to unionize but often fails to do so in practice. Employers can delay union recognition for months or years through multiple legal challenges. When they illegally fire workers who organize, a disturbingly common practice, or fail to bargain in good faith, the penalties are so weak that they are nearly nonexistent.

Even where unions exist, the law requires employers to bargain only with their own employees; it does not require bargaining to benefit all workers in a sector or a supply chain. This structure is especially ill suited for responding to concerns raised by A.I., which is built through chains of engineers, contractors, cloud workers, data annotators, content moderators and vendors spread across firms.

Despite the obstacles, American tech workers have more power than they may realize. Tech workers, especially engineers building generative A.I., are expensive to hire, expensive to train and difficult to replace. They understand the systems they are building better than the regulators trying to govern those systems, better than the executives deploying them and certainly better than the pundits debating their consequences. When they act collectively, they can help safeguard not only their own interests, but society’s interests more broadly.

Workers in other industries have shown what that kind of leverage can accomplish. Hollywood writers and actors did not wait for Congress to solve the threat of generative A.I.; they used strikes and collective bargaining to win rules over how studios could use scripts, voices and likenesses. Earlier in history, autoworkers transformed what were low-wage jobs into the backbone of the middle class, and their organization’s leadership went on to support the civil rights movement. Worker power can do more than improve individual workplaces: It can reshape an industry’s obligations to the public.

If we want A.I. policy that actually works for the public, then decisions cannot be made by executives and investors alone. Workers must have a say in what they build, whom it serves and how it is used. If they do, the rest of us will have a better chance of living with technology governed by democratic values, not merely by corporate and military imperatives.