Working Partnerships USA

AI is being deployed in the institutions working people depend on most: hospitals, benefits offices, government agencies.  And the people it affects most have had the least say in how it’s used. That’s starting to change. Workers and unions aren’t waiting for state or federal policy to catch up, they’re negotiating AI accountability directly, in contract talks and county boardrooms, and they’re starting to make change.

On March 24, the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to move forward with a comprehensive study on how AI is being used across county departments. The vote came with real commitments: co-create AI policy with employees, ensure human review of AI outputs, guarantee the right to appeal AI-driven decisions, and pledge that technology will augment workers, not replace them.

Days later, AFSCME Local 101, which represents 3,400 City of San José employees, introduced a package of AI safeguards as part of ongoing contract negotiations. Their demands include prohibiting AI from being used to replace workers, limiting its role in hiring and performance monitoring, and establishing a joint oversight committee to review new systems before they’re deployed. 

These aren’t isolated moments. They’re part of a coordinated push by workers, unions, and organizations to ensure that the region that builds this technology doesn’t get to ignore its consequences. WPUSA Executive Director Maria Noel Fernandez and SEIU Local 521 CEO Riko Mendez made that case in a Mercury News op-ed this month: frontline public workers are not obstacles to technological progress, they are its most important quality-control system. When they are cut out of the process, systems fail and real people suffer the consequences.

But the stakes extend beyond the workplace. When algorithms make decisions about who receives public benefits, who gets flagged by law enforcement, or how medical care is triaged, entire communities bear the consequences,  especially low-income residents, immigrants, and communities of color who have the least recourse when systems fail them. Winning accountability in our public institutions isn’t just a labor issue. It’s a civil rights issue.

The Board’s vote is a foundation. The contract fight in San José is a test. What this region decides in the coming months will set a precedent that ripples far beyond our borders, and we are determined to get it right.

On March 10, the San José City Council voted unanimously to adopt new safeguards for its network of 474 Flock Safety license plate reader cameras, reducing data retention from one year to 30 days, restricting where cameras can be placed, and tightening access controls for outside law enforcement agencies. Workers, immigrants, and community members showed up to City Hall and made their voices heard. While the Council took some steps forward, residents and advocates had called for more, including cutting ties with Flock Safety entirely.

Across the Bay Area, cities have been grappling with what Flock Safety actually is, and what it enables. An internal audit revealed that from August to November 2024, several federal law enforcement agencies accessed Mountain View’s Flock cameras without the city’s permission or knowledge, because Flock had quietly enabled a nationwide search setting on its own. Mountain View called it a system failure. But the deeper problem is this: a private vendor had the ability to open a city’s surveillance infrastructure to federal agencies, and no one in the city government knew it was happening until it was too late. Santa Clara County, Mountain View, and Los Altos Hills have all since terminated their Flock contracts. San José has not.

The legal pressure on the city is mounting. Civil liberties groups sued San José in November 2025 over the cameras’ violation of California’s constitution. In April 2026, a second federal lawsuit was filed, this time seeking class-action status on behalf of all San José residents,  arguing that nearly 500 AI-connected cameras tracking every driver’s movements without a warrant or probable cause constitutes an unconstitutional mass surveillance system. The suits make clear that the guardrails the Council adopted in March didn’t go nearly far enough.

Meanwhile, Mayor Matt Mahan has been one of Flock Safety’s most prominent boosters, appearing in promotional material on the company’s own website touting San José’s expansion of the camera network. That’s worth noting as the city weighs its next steps.

This isn’t just a technology story. It’s a story about power. Who has it, who doesn’t, and how decisions that shape our daily lives are being made behind closed doors. Every surveillance contract a city signs is a choice about who gets watched, who gets trusted, and who gets power. Those choices should be made openly, with community input, and with the ability to say no, not handed off to vendors in a procurement process most people never see.

The Flock fight is part of a larger pattern. Across Silicon Valley, surveillance infrastructure is being built out, from license plate readers, facial recognition, to data-sharing contracts with companies like Palantir, with little public debate and even less public understanding of what these systems do, who can access the data, and what happens when it’s wrong. In some cases, the same platforms touching crime data are also touching immigration enforcement and benefits eligibility. The line between city services and surveillance is blurring, and it’s happening in a regulatory void. That’s exactly why we’re building a coalition to demand democratic control over how these technologies are deployed in our communities.

Real public safety requires transparency and accountability. When private vendors can operate city systems without oversight and open them up to federal agencies without anyone knowing, that doesn’t make our communities safer — it makes them more vulnerable, especially for immigrant communities, people seeking healthcare, and residents exercising their right to protest.

On March 18, approximately 2,400 Kaiser Permanente mental health therapists, social workers, and psychologists went on strike across California including right here in Santa Clara County,  and we were proud to stand with them on the picket line. 

The strike wasn’t just about pay. It was about Kaiser’s decision to overhaul its patient triage system, replacing trained therapists with yes-or-no prompts and AI-assisted routing, without input from a care provider, without transparency, and without accountability when things go wrong.

Kaiser is under both state and federal monitoring for mental health parity violations, having paid out over $230 million in penalties for failing to provide adequate mental healthcare to its 4.6 million patients. Despite that, the company has refused to include protections against AI replacing therapists in its Northern California contract, even while its Southern California agreement includes that exact language. When union bargaining committee members asked directly whether the change foreshadowed layoffs, Kaiser said it wanted “flexibility.”

This isn’t just a Kaiser story. It’s the same playbook we’re seeing across industries: deploy the technology fast, skip worker input, call it innovation, and when workers push back, call them the problem. The workers who get hit first are always the same,  lower-wage, majority women, majority workers of color. 

WPUSA Executive Director Maria Noel Fernandez joined healthcare workers, California Nurses Association, Working Families Party, and representatives from Assemblymember Ash Kalra and Senator Dave Cortese’s offices on the picket line. Her message was simple: when one of us is on the line, all of us show up.

The fight for worker voice in how technology gets deployed, in hospitals, in warehouses, in government offices,  is the same fight, and we’re building the coalition to win it.

In January 2025, we joined workers, unions, researchers, and community allies from across California at the Making Tech Work for Workers convening. Together, we shared strategies for responding to the ways AI is already transforming work, and imagined a future where digital innovation is guided by the needs of working people.

We gained key insights from working people across a range of professions, as well as from academics, researchers, and union leaders.

• AI is already here, and it’s being used to hire, fire, surveil, and automate work, often with no oversight
• These tools can reinforce existing inequalities, especially for women, immigrants, and workers of color
• We need stronger laws, organizing strategies, and contract language to protect workers from digital exploitation
• Worker power is the solution, unions, community organizations, and grassroots leadership are essential to shaping tech for the common good

We also got the chance to hear from workers from a range of industries from warehouse workers and healthcare workers, to gig workers and teachers. Watch our 1:1 interviews with workers and conference attendees here.

This conference was organized by the Conference Steering Committee, with advice from the Labor Advisory Committee.

Conference Steering Committee 

UC Berkeley Labor Center | UCLA Labor Center | UC Merced Community and Labor Center | UC San Diego Labor Center | UC Santa Cruz Center for Labor and Community | California Federation of Labor Unions | TechEquity | Working Partnerships USA

Labor Advisory Committee 

California Coalition for Worker Power | California Conference Board of the Amalgamated Transit Union | California Federation of Labor Unions | California Federation of Teachers | California Nurses Association | California Teamsters Public Affairs Council | IATSE | PowerSwitch Action | SAG-AFTRA | SEIU California | UC Davis Labor and Community Center | UC Irvine Labor Center | UCR Inland Empire Labor and Community Center | UCSB Community Labor Center | UDW/AFSCME Local 3930 | UFCW Western States Council

This conference was made possible by the generous support of the Freedom Together Foundation, the James Irvine Foundation, and the Omidyar Network Fund.