Lisa is a senior researcher in the Technology and Work Program at the UC Berkeley Labor Center, where she studies topics at the intersection of technology, labor and employment relations, and job quality. Her recent research focuses on analyzing the range of data-driven digital technologies developed for and deployed in the workplace—including electronic monitoring systems, algorithmic management tools, automated decision-making systems, and task automation technologies, many of which are commonly grouped under the broad umbrella of artificial intelligence. She also studies the role of collective bargaining in advancing worker-centered approaches to technological change, as well as broader labor movement strategies for shaping the design and governance of these systems. Lisa provides research, analysis, and technical assistance to a wide range of stakeholders—including unions, worker organizations, policymakers, and advocates—engaged in efforts to ensure that digital technologies advance, rather than undermine, worker rights and well-being. Before joining the Labor Center, she conducted research on farmworker health, housing, and labor conditions at the California Institute for Rural Studies. With a multidisciplinary grounding in the social sciences, she holds a dual undergraduate degree in anthropology and sociology from the College of Idaho and a master’s degree in community development from UC Davis.
A searchable inventory of contract provisions from over 175 union agreements showing how collective bargaining has been used to address workplace technologies, protect worker rights, and shape technology adoption, use, and oversight.
Accessible, non-technical FAQ answering common questions about AI and other digital technologies in the workplace, how employers use them, and how workers are impacted.
Workers and their unions took center stage in 2023 by negotiating landmark agreements that address emerging workplace technologies. Alongside establishing fundamental rights regarding the adoption of new technologies, unions negotiated protective measures for workers, provisions ensuring workers share in the benefits of these advancements, and even reined in certain technological applications. Here’s a closer look at some of the major technology bargaining agreements reached this year.
Our goal in this comment is to highlight evidence indicating the prevalence of automated workplace surveillance and management technologies, impact on workers resulting from employers’ use of these systems, and principles and policy models for worker technology rights and protections.
A 1987 report from the federal Office of Technology Assessment recognized the potential for employers to misuse and abuse new technologies resulting in adverse effects for workers, but recommended a “wait and see” approach due to lack of data to justify regulation. This blog post reviews decades of research since publication of the report that finds electronic performance monitoring (EPM) systems do increase worker stress and cause other harms.
“The topic of AI and other digital technologies are showing up in contract fights and organizing campaigns, increasingly in public policy debates across a variety of sectors,” Lisa Kresge, senior researcher at UC Berkeley’s Labor Center, told NPQ.
The UC Berkeley Labor Center has launched a new tool to help labor union negotiators, researchers, media, and policymakers better understand how unions have addressed workplace technologies through collective bargaining.
In a world where algorithms increasingly dictate tasks, monitor performance, and even generate content, the traditional landscape of labor relations is undergoing a seismic shift.
The University of California-Berkeley’s Labor Center has announced a new data tool to help labor union negotiators, researchers, media, and policymakers better understand the state of play of union negotiations around the digital economy.
Lisa Kresge points out that, “Unions are negotiating around specific workplace technologies, rather than negotiating around technology in general.”
Using quantification and measurement to drive decision-making is becoming ubiquitous throughout US businesses. “We’ve been obsessed by that as a society in the US for quite some time,” says Lisa Kresge.
“If technologies are not developed with the user in mind, they often fail,” said Lisa Kresge, a research and policy associate at the University of California Berkeley Labor Center, who has written about union responses to technology.
More and more unions are bargaining for advanced notice of new technology from employers, helping them understand in real time whether it will displace workers or change the environment, said Lisa Kresge, a researcher at the University of California-Berkeley who studies tech clauses in union contracts.
As Kresge observes, unions in the U.S. are currently in the throes of negotiating for limitations on how data can be used by employers and against the unnecessary uses of countless surveillance technologies in the workplace
Productivity scores give the impression that they are objective and impartial and can be trusted because they are technologically derived – but are they? How the proprietary systems arrive at their scores is often as unclear to managers as it is to workers, says Kresge.
