Last month, Gov. Newsom signed first generation guardrails on how bosses and businesses use AI at work, in health care, in schools, and across our lives. These bills passed despite an aggressive, well-funded lobbying campaign from Big Tech to defeat them. Together, they lay the foundation for a new set of rights for workers and community members in the age of AI.
first-generation guardrails against bossware
Most of the public conversation about AI and work focuses on automation and job loss. That matters. But for many workers, AI isn’t a distant threat. New management technologies, powered by AI, are already watching them, measuring them, and deciding their fate on the job.
It’s called bossware: software that tracks workers’ keystrokes, locations, and productivity, scores their performance, and increasingly makes decisions about who gets disciplined or fired. Until now, there were no rules for how employers use AI to watch us, judge us, and fire us. Most workers don’t even know how they’re being monitored or how algorithms make decisions about their lives. There’s often no human to check for errors or bias, and no way to push back. No one wants to be watched, managed, or fired by an algorithm. That starts to change now.
The fight for new workplace protections, the first of their kind in the nation, were led by the California Federation of Labor Unions, AFL-CIO, and won by union members, workers, and community advocates who organized for them across the state. Here’s what we won:
- A human makes the call – SB 947 bans bosses from using AI to discipline or fire workers without human oversight. Gov. Newsom vetoed similar protections last session. Workers kept organizing and brought them back.
- No surveillance in bathrooms – AB 1331 bans the use of any AI surveillance in workplace bathrooms.
- No emotion tracking or brain data – AB 1883 bans employers from using biased and invasive AI surveillance to infer or predict workers’ emotions or collect their neural data, information drawn from devices that read brain activity.
- The right to know – SB 951 updates California’s WARN Act, the law requiring advance notice of mass layoffs, so workers learn when layoffs are caused by AI. It also directs the Employment Development Department to study AI’s impact on hiring.
Beyond the workplace
These protections don’t stop at work. New laws also keep people in charge of our schools, our health care, and how businesses treat us as consumers.
- Keeping health care in human hands – AB 1979 requires health care professionals, not AI, to remain the decision-makers in clinical care.
- Real professors in the classroom – SB 928 prohibits CSU faculty from being replaced by AI.
- People, not bots, in our public schools – AB 2148 requires public school employees and contractors to be people, not AI.
- New tools against monopolies – AB 1776 gives the state more power to fight corporate monopolies that drive down wages, make it harder to unionize, and raise prices.
- A real person when you need one – AB 1609 requires businesses to connect customers with a human service rep within 15 minutes of a request.
- Disclosure of AI performers in ads – SB 1050 requires advertisers to disclose when a performer is created by AI.
What didn’t pass
Tech billionaires continue to try to write their own rules and set the agenda, rolling out AI at breakneck speed and using our schools and hospitals as testing grounds. Nowhere is this clearer than in the bills that failed this year, despite more than a year of organizing by our partners:
- Surveillance pricing goes unchecked – AB 2564 would have banned corporations from exploiting our personal data to jack up grocery prices.
- Health care workers left unprotected – AB 2575 would have protected health care workers from retaliation for using their best judgment instead of relying on AI.
- AI in mental health care remains largely unchecked – SB 903 would have limited the use of AI in mental health settings.
These fights aren’t over. These wins come as polling across the country shows Americans across the political spectrum overwhelmingly support AI regulation that puts working families first. This isn’t just a labor issue. It’s about whether technology serves people or the other way around. California has now shown the country that real rules for AI are possible, even against Big Tech’s money and influence.
What comes next
These laws will protect workers, families, and communities from some of AI’s worst abuses, including the most invasive surveillance, discrimination, and outright replacement on the job in some cases . But they are a first step.
Laws only matter if every worker is protected, and these need to be stronger, and there’s a long way to go for that to be reality. Notably, rideshare drivers are left out of the SB 947 party even though they have been experiencing unfair algorithmic management and firing for years.
That is why we are committed to keep building a robust set of worker technology rights, and ensure worker and community voices are centered in how digital technology is used in our public services, schools, and health care. This is the only way technological progress works for us, not against us.
Ready to build on this win? Join the People’s Tech Coalition SCC.
