Donald Trump’s rollback of basic guardrails for artificial intelligence leaves US workers “at real risk”, labor experts have warned.
Protections introduced under Joe Biden to ensure the safe, secure and trustworthy development and use of AI were swiftly repealed by the Trump administration – as top executives outlined sweeping plans to overhaul the labor force.
Today’s CEOs are likely the last to “manage a workforce of only human beings”, Salesforce boss Marc Benioff claimed at Davos. Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta Platforms, meanwhile told podcaster Joe Rogan that its AI will “probably” be able to act as “a sort of midlevel engineer” as soon as this year.
“Workers are at a relatively weak point,” said top labor scholar David Madland, who argued the AI protection rollbacks under Trump “made it even more so that workers are at the whims of their employers on how AI is deployed”.
“I think they’re going to be at real risk of having their jobs degraded in many different kinds of ways,” said Madland, a senior fellow and senior adviser to the American Worker Project at Center for American Progress. “The Biden administration rules provided very modest – only very modest – protections, but they were better than nothing.”
Under Trump the US government is “promoting and encouraging AI innovation to ensure America remains the leader in this cutting edge technology”, Victoria LaCivita, White House office of science and technology policy Sspokesperson, said in a statement. “The Trump administration is committed to ensuring the continued American leadership in AI.”
Among the guidelines removed by the Trump administration were directives issued by the US Department of Labor to ensure employers create and implement AI in the workplace without diminishing job quality or violating workers’ rights. Significant cuts are also expected at the US AI Safety Institute, as part of Trump’s efforts to cull the federal workforce.
“It strips out consideration of civil rights, job quality and the impact on workers,” said Josh Boxerman, government affairs manager for the National Employment Law Project.
He pointed to concerns about the degrading quality of jobs, rather than their displacement. AI is increasingly being used to manage workers, from impacts on surveillance and productivity pressures on Amazon warehouse workers, algorithm management of ride share drivers with gig apps such as Uber and Lyft, and recent growing trends of gig work in the healthcare industry, including algorithms used to mass deny health insurance claims and apps using AI to undercut pay and working conditions for nurses.
“The story of displacement right now is not just workers being replaced by robots or work being automated away, but also workers being replaced or jobs being replaced by jobs of lower quality,” said Boxerman. Trump, he noted, won back the presidency last year after successfully seeking support from the working class.
Many of the tech companies at the heart of the AI boom, including Meta, Google and Amazon, lined up to support Trump’s inauguration with donations. The OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman personally donated $1m.
Recent polling by Pew Research found 52% of US workers are worried about the future impacts of AI in the workplace, with 32% expecting it will lead to fewer job opportunities for them.
“In the absence of strong guardrails, those tools are creating real-world harms when companies and government agencies use them to help decide who gets a job, who gets a loan, who goes to jail, and a host of other sensitive decisions,” wrote attorneys with the American Civil Liberties Union on Trump’s AI executive orders.
The use of AI, and its impact on workers, was front on mind when the Writers Guild of America and actors represented by Sag-Aftra secured their 2023 contracts.
John Rogers, a screenwriter and board member with the Writers Guild of America West, said: “The general concern is always that corporations will attempt to maximize the profits at the expense of the workers. AI is the dream of capital everywhere, which is it would be nice to have income with no workers. So we always have to be aware of that.”
As AI progresses and its use expands, there are ongoing concerns about writers’ work being stolen to develop the technology, he said. “Right now, there is no consequence for companies that are valued at billions of dollars being valued only because they stole other people’s work,” added Rogers.
“There are arguments to be made that when a new technology comes along that makes things better or more efficient, you should embrace it,” he said. “This doesn’t make things better. It doesn’t do things more efficient. It doesn’t make things cheaper. The consumers don’t want AI slop. The creators don’t want their stuff sold for AI.
“The only people who want AI are the people making AI, who need people to invest billions of dollars in it. And right now, not just the creators, but also the consumers, are suffering from it.”
The labor department was contacted for comment.
