A worker’s protection against workplace artificial intelligence increasingly depends on whether they belong to a union.
Union contracts have become one of the most powerful safeguards against AI-driven job cuts, Axios reported Sunday. While unions represented about 16.5 million U.S. workers in 2025, only 11.2 percent of the U.S. workforce was covered, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. As roughly 130 million Americans are left with no coverage, Congress remains largely inactive as employers roll out AI tools.
“AI is something we can negotiate,” NewsGuild-CWA President Jon Schleuss told Axios. “Without a contract and without a union, you have no say.”
Schleuss added that regulation of AI in workplaces happens “at the bargaining table, where workers are showing up and demanding protections.”
NewsGuild has around 85 to 90 contracts including worker protections against AI, Axios reported.
The NewsGuild-CWA, SAG-AFTRA, the AFL-CIO, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.
“Best way to AI-proof your job? Form a union!” California Labor Federation president Lorena Gonzalez Fletcher said in a post on X. “As politicians punt, Collective Bargaining has provided the only meaningful guardrails to AI in the workplace.”
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Unionized Politico journalists won an arbitration case against management in November 2025 after an arbitrator found the outlet had violated their collective bargaining agreement by deploying two AI tools, according to a Communications Workers of America statement. One, Capitol AI Report-Builder, “produced branded policy reports for POLITICO Pro subscribers without any editorial review, despite generating glaring factual errors.”
Actors’ union SAG-AFTRA approved a new TV/Theatrical Agreement in June 2026, which “builds on previous AI and digital replica protections to include new terms that further restrict use of synthetics, giving added protection against AI replacing members’ work,” according to the union’s official announcement.
Workers most exposed to white-collar automation are among the least likely to be part of a union, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Only 4.4 percent of workers in “computer and mathematical occupations” and 1.1 percent in finance jobs were represented by a union in 2025. By comparison, 35.9 percent in “education, training, and library occupations” were union-protected.
It’s no surprise, then, that several AI developers, notably Elon Musk, told the New York Times’ DealBook Summit in 2023 that he “[disagreed] with the idea of unions,” because they “naturally create negativity in a company.”
That negativity from unions, though, seems to be felt only in the minds of the executives—the very people whom unions are designed to protect workers against. Many experts view AI as a way for corporate leaders to outmaneuver workers by replacing them or reducing their importance. Indeed, many of the experts interviewed for this piece all agreed that unions protect workers from the disruptive impacts of rapid AI development in their jobs.
AI regulation at the federal level is slow. “Baby steps,” Executive Director of the AFL-CIO Tech Institute Lauren McFerran told Axios. “It’s kind of a classic people versus money issue.”
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