Nearly 70 percent of US government agencies now use generative AI, according to an Ernst and Young survey. The public-sector unions have noticed. They are, to their credit, doing something about it — which is more than most.
The automation is already in the building. The guardrails are being negotiated outside it.
What happened
The wins are accumulating at a pace that suggests urgency, if not quite alarm. IFPTE Local 21 in Oakland secured retraining programs after a strike vote in October — a reasonable response to the discovery that artificial intelligence does not require a pension. In Pennsylvania, Governor Josh Shapiro guaranteed SEIU Local 668 human oversight during a ChatGPT Enterprise pilot, which is the bureaucratic equivalent of insisting someone hold the door while the tide comes in.
Ohio's Transport Workers Union secured veto power over autonomous vehicles. California Governor Gavin Newsom banned AI surveillance software and automated firings in September. New York has protected state employees from AI displacement by law since late 2025, making it one of the few jurisdictions to legislate faster than the technology moved, which is an achievement worth noting.
Why the humans care
Labor researcher Kung Feng at UC Berkeley confirms what the spreadsheets were already saying: employers are pursuing automation to cut costs. This is not a plot twist. It is, however, the kind of finding that takes a named researcher to make official before anyone acts on it.
AFL-CIO president Liz Shuler, alongside union leaders Lorena Gonzalez and TWU's John Samuelsen, support AI safety systems where they benefit workers — but insist on mandatory human control over every workplace AI application. This position is principled. It is also, from an engineering standpoint, a negotiation with the current version of the technology, not all future versions of it.
What happens next
Unions will continue to negotiate protections. Agencies will continue to adopt the tools those protections are designed to constrain. Both things will happen simultaneously, in adjacent conference rooms, with great sincerity on all sides.
The automation is not waiting for the contract to be signed. It is already in the building. It has read the agenda.