AI Workers' Inquiry 2026

UTAW Tech Workers' Inquiry 2026 gathers frontline tech workers’ experiences to show how generative AI is reorganizing work across the sector. Participants report predominantly negative effects: AI raises output expectations, intensifies labor, expands surveillance, degrades expertise, shifts accountability onto employees, and fragments teams. Rather than eliminating tasks, AI redistributes and often increases work while enabling employers to rationalize redundancies, cut junior hiring, deskill staff, and transfer risk. Technical problems like hallucinations matter but are secondary to workplace dynamics; the decisive issue is who controls AI deployment. Workers also flag environmental harms, military and state surveillance uses, and mental-health impacts, arguing that positive outcomes require workers’ ability to choose whether and how to use these tools.

The inquiry translates these findings into concrete policy demands: a statutory AI-at-work regulator with investigatory and enforcement powers; mandatory disclosure, independent impact assessments, and worker-led consultation or bargaining before deployment; legal protections to refuse AI without penalty and rights to human review; protections for training and junior career pathways; expanded health-and-safety rules addressing psychological harms and a right to disconnect; stricter environmental and dual-use oversight; limits on using AI-usage data for discipline; and stronger redundancy and offshoring safeguards. Collective bargaining and enforceable worker control over AI at work are central.