“California is the first and only place in the U.S. where workers are starting to gain basic rights over their data and how employers use that data to make critical decisions about them,” said Annette Bernhardt.

California is the first and only place where employees are getting critical info about their data, UC Berkeley Labor Center Director Annette Bernhardt told the board during public comment ahead of the vote, and recent amendments threaten to deprive workers of agency over algorithmic tools.

“Intense monitoring can push warehouse workers to the point of injury, biased hiring algorithms can shut women and workers of color out of opportunity, and gig platform workers can end up making below the minimum wage,” said Annette Bernhardt.

“We need to assure that workers have a seat at the table on these technologies from the outset, not just when they’re being implemented,” said Annette Bernhardt

“It is necessary to ensure that impactful decisions are still made by a human,” said Annette Bernhardt, Director of the Technology and Work programme at the UC Berkeley Labor Center.

The role of AI as a tool for school and business was a key theme of the symposium. Annette Bernhardt, director of the technology and work program at the UC Berkeley Labor Center, emphasized the balance between worker privacy and the benefit of highly productive AI tools.

A workplace tech accountability bill would force employers to tell workers they’re being spied on and would ban surveillance outside of work.

Annette Bernhardt, Lisa Kresge, and Reem Suleiman of the UC Berkeley Labor Center argue that companies should be required to reveal “which activities will be monitored, the method of monitoring, the data that will be gathered, the times and places where the monitoring will occur, and the purpose for monitoring and why it is necessary.”

Annette Bernhardt, along with Lisa Kresge and Reem Suleiman of the labor center, released a report on Wednesday outlining how employees in a variety of industries are tracked and surveilled in the course of doing their jobs, and what rights workers should have over how information about them is collected, stored and used.

Instead, policymakers should focus on traditional approaches that will boost the economy as a whole. Pandemic responses should aim to support businesses and workers—both salaried and non-salaried—alike, addressing inequality through a focus on its root causes and industry-level trends. This last point was captured by Annette Bernhardt, a labor economist at U.C. Berkeley, who found little evidence of “a strong, unambiguous shift toward nonstandard or contingent forms of work—especially in contrast to the dramatic increase in wage inequality.”