Updated November 12, 2024. An overview of current U.S. public policy that regulates employers’ use of digital workplace technologies.

Prepared Testimony by Dr. Annette Bernhardt, Director, Technology and Work Program, UC Berkeley Labor Center for the Joint Informational Hearing, California State Assembly, Committee on Privacy and Consumer Protection and Committee on Labor and Employment. August 7, 2024, Sacramento, CA.

Joint letter providing input on the California Privacy Protection Agency’s current rulemaking for the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), which will detail a set of important worker rights and employer responsibilities for the use of data-driven technologies in the workplace.

Prepared testimony by Annette Bernhardt, presented at “California at the Forefront: Steering AI Towards Ethical Horizons,” Joint Informational Hearing by the CA Senate Governmental Organization Committee and the Senate Budget Subcommittee on State Administration and General Government. February 21, 2024, Sacramento, CA.

We outline core principles for how government action on AI can benefit public and private sector workers, and comment on how two recent executive orders reflect those principles. Our goal is to help inform the significant work that lies ahead for federal, state, and local governments in their efforts to model responsible use of AI.

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.

This memo provides an overview of workers’ rights under the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) and how workers can exercise these rights.

The pandemic’s myriad effects on the U.S. economy will be the subject of research and attention for many years to come. In this report, we delve into some of the pandemic’s impacts by focusing on one question: How did the COVID-19 pandemic affect technology adoption in U.S. warehouses?

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.

This report explores how governments use technology, what drives technology adoption, and how technologies affect public sector workers and the delivery of public services. Using examples across local, state, and federal governments, the report finds that transparency and accountability have lagged behind rapid technology adoption in the wake of COVID-19, and that public sector workers play a critical role in ensuring that technology is used to strengthen the ability of governments to provide quality and equitable public services.

The workplace is rapidly becoming a major site for the deployment of AI-based technologies; it is high time that our laws and regulations catch up.

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.

We provide an overview of existing research that attempts to measure the prevalence of employers’ use of workplace management technologies – i.e., technologies that are used to monitor, evaluate, or make predictions about workers, or assist or augment their tasks.

Understanding how technological changes may unfold in different industries is essential for developing effective solutions to the challenges that workers face. In this report, we synthesize the findings of five industry studies: trucking, warehouses, health care, retail, and food delivery.

The UC Berkeley Labor Center’s Technology and Work program provided input to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) initiative on developing a Bill of Rights for an Automated Society.

This groundbreaking report provides a new and comprehensive set of policy principles for worker technology rights in the United States.

This report examines trends in food retail in the U.S. preceding and up through the pandemic, assessing how e-commerce is likely to affect workers in the industry in the next 5-10 years. In contrast to widespread fears that technology leads to automation-related job loss, e-commerce is creating jobs, as customers are now paying for tasks that they used to do themselves for free. But for most of these new positions, job quality is a serious concern, and the passage of Proposition 22 in California this fall exacerbates the problem.

This paper offers a framework for understanding the broad range of data collection strategies and algorithmic systems currently in use or being developed for the workplace. It describes key technologies and how they operate, the context in which they evolved, and their potential applications in the workplace. 

This paper reviews strategies that unions have used to leverage their collective bargaining agreements to address technological change, both past and present. It groups these approaches into three categories: those focused on establishing rights and roles regarding the decision to adopt new technology, those designed to mitigate the introduction of new technology, and those related to the use of technology in workforce management.

This paper provides an inventory of existing and proposed public policy strategies designed to mitigate the risks and maximize the benefits of data-driven technologies when applied in the workplace. The strategies are organized into five groups: notice and transparency, accountability, individual data rights, workplace rights, and government oversight and regulation.