Walters: Union leaders warn Newsom their campaign support hinges on his AI stance

National labor union leaders, and those from California and early presidential primary states, are gathering in Sacramento this week to bluntly warn Gavin Newsom that union support for his 2028 presidential campaign hinges on protecting jobs from artificial intelligence.

The event, organized by the California Federation of Labor Unions, calls AI “the biggest existential threat facing working Americans today.” The group wants Newsom “or any candidate looking forward to the 2028 election” to know “loud and clear” that “our members want a leader who works with organized labor to protect jobs and create guardrails on artificial intelligence.”

The event evidently singles out Newsom due to his frontrunner status in very early pre-campaign polling, as well as the leading role California’s high tech industry plays in developing AI and Newsom’s somewhat ambivalent attitude toward AI’s potential effects.

“The proliferation of artificial intelligence in recent years has been nothing short of explosive,” a background paper for the event declares. “Employers have latched on to AI for everything: from using it to monitor and surveil workers to setting workers’ wages to outright replacement of workers.

“Artificial intelligence is a multi-billion-dollar industry that continues to proceed unchecked, without common sense guardrails in place, leaving workers’ livelihoods ruined and even lost in its wake.”

The briefing paper pointedly cites Newsom’s veto of last year’s Senate Bill 7, a union-backed bill to bar employers from using AI to make employee discipline and termination decisions. In rejecting it, Newsom said the measure was “overly broad” and would prevent even innocuous uses of AI.

Newsom’s veto exemplifies his efforts, as the AI industry explodes, to satisfy both the tech industry, with which he has decades-long political ties, and those who worry about AI’s societal and economic impacts.

The bill is one of many introduced to deal with those impacts. Overall, Newsom has tended to favor attempts to protect children and other vulnerable groups from AI, while opposing measures that could throttle the industry’s growth. Taxing profits on AI investments is an important revenue source for a state with chronic budget deficits.

During his final State of the State address to the Legislature last month Newsom said, “It goes without saying that no technology holds more promise and more peril to jobs, to our economy, to our way of life than artificial intelligence. The tech genie, it’s out of the bottle. So the question is not whether change is happening; it is. The question is: What values will guide us into this new frontier?”

Newsom lauded “landmark legislation to create the nation’s first rules for responsible, ethical, and safe use of AI, regulations that provide guardrails that balance risk and opportunity.”

He termed it “a template for the nation” recently emulated by New York, but he did not mention measures, such as SB 7, that he directly or indirectly blocked.

Whether AI poses the threat that worries union leaders is not easily determined. If one inserts “AI effect on jobs” into an internet search engine (powered by AI, of course) a cornucopia of studies and reports immediately pops up.

While they all acknowledge there will be impacts, there’s a wide assortment of opinions on what industries and job categories will be affected and whether those effects will be evolutionary or revolutionary, positive or negative.

Unions have assumed the negative, as witnessed by the 148-day strike by Hollywood screenwriters in 2023 over the effects of AI on their craft. It’s also noteworthy — and ironic — that Silicon Valley technology companies are shedding workers as they use AI to do the coding work that had been done by humans.

Uncertainty about the future creates fear and fear is a huge motivator in political campaigns, as Newsom will be reminded this week.

Dan Walters is a CalMatters columnist.