BY CARTER MYERS-BROWN
Artificial intelligence has produced a range of reactions across New York City s labor movement. Some unions have embraced the technology as a tool that can support workers, while others have fought to limit its use where it threatens jobs or professional expertise. Y
Yet, the following perspectives demonstrate that workers, labor leaders and elected officials alike largely agree that AI should be governed by transparency, accountability and protections that places workers’ rights at the center of the discussion.
District Council 37, New York City’s largest municipal union, has taken one of the more legislatively active postures of any NY union on AI — Executive Director Henry Garrido testified before the state Senate, backed by clerical administration employees and members of Local 1549. Garrido’s testimony discussed a specific, documented case of algorithmic bias inside a city agency.
Union Leaders
Henry Garrido has said that city agencies were deploying AI faster than they could ensure it was safe or fair, citing a specific example from child welfare services:
“City agencies such as Health + Hospitals in the Department of Social Services are aggressively introducing AI in work that deals directly with the health and welfare of the public sector and of New Yorkers. A recent audit revealed that an AI tool that’s being used at the Administration of Children’s Services was trained on data that’s a decade old, and the programs used factors for determining eligibility that are clear proxies for race and socioeconomic status. This algorithm does not empower social workers. It undermines their professional expertise with a biased system.”
A DC 37 blog post summarized the union’s stance as well: “As a union, we must step in before workers see themselves being replaced due to shortsighted AI adoption. Artificial Intelligence has become the go-to solution for ‘fast and cheap’ labor. It’s implemented to answer calls, run reports, write essays, create art, and supplement social media campaigns. However, DC 37 draws the line when AI threatens to replace union jobs or severely impact workers’ job duties.”
Brittany Stinson, DC 37’s Deputy Director of Political Action and Legislation, articulated a more conditional, bargaining-table-focused version of the union’s position, one that sees the potential the technology has to make workers’ lives easier:
“AI can be used to bring benefits to a workplace and support employees. Unfortunately, it’s also being used as a cost-saving measure that displaces employees. We need to be at the decision-making table and emphasize that there must be proper implementation and regulations around AI to make sure our members are able to use it as a supportive tool and not as a mechanism to eventually eliminate their jobs.”
The United Federation of Teachers’ posture stands apart from every other union above. Rather than treating AI as a threat to be resisted, the union entered into a $23 million partnership with Microsoft, OpenAI and Anthropic to build its own AI training infrastructure for teachers. According to the union, the initiative will allow workers to control how the technology is used.
Union Leaders
Michael Mulgrew, UFT president, described the National Academy for AI Instruction as a defensive maneuver and a cautious embrace of the technology: “Technology is routinely weaponized against us. We were not going to sit by and watch that happen again. This initiative allows us to take control of AI in the education sphere and develop it for and by educators.”
“We’re all very skeptical, but we also are very hopeful” — an assessment shaped by his view that social media proved to be “a dumpster fire” despite its initial promise. Later, pushing back on the city’s rollout of classroom AI guidance, Mulgrew drew a firmer line around what AI cannot replace: it “must be used wisely” and cannot substitute for the “human connection between educators and students.”
Randi Weingarten, the American Federation of Teachers president and Mulgrew’s national counterpart, has taken a harder stance — by May 2026 calling for a “Big Tech Tax” and screen bans in schools, and warning that “artificial intelligence is accelerating the steepest upward transfer of wealth in modern history.” The gap between Weingarten’s rhetoric and the UFT’s partnership with AI companies reveals the drastic differences in labor’s potential responses to AI.
The Montefiore Medical Center dispute has become a defining example of how AI affects workers in New York — a case where the New York State Nurses Association alleged the hospital replaced veteran nurses with a new AI technology called Datavant, rather than using it to supplement their work.
Union Leaders
Nancy Hagans, NYSNA president: “Artificial intelligence should never replace real human caring from a nurse. The 45,000 members of NYSNA fully support this fight to protect our patients and practice from AI.”
Worker voices
Shaiju Kalathil, a NYSNA executive committee member at Montefiore: “We are outraged about these layoffs because these dedicated nurses are being replaced by AI. This is a violation of the contract that we recently won by going on strike.”
Marilyn Shuler, a registered nurse laid off after 39 years at Montefiore, described not just economic loss but a rupture in her sense of professional dignity: “I’ve always, always taken so much pride in the organization that I’ve worked for all these years, and just to be treated this way. It’s disrespectful, and it’s very disheartening, and my colleagues feel the same way as well.”
Unlike the AI fights in other industries, which center on job elimination that has already happened or is in the process of taking shape, the transit fight in New York is largely preemptive, unions say. The Transport Workers Union is trying to stave off automation before it’s implemented, using public polling to bolster its position ahead of the union’s next contract cycle with the MTA.
Union Leaders
John Samuelsen, TWU International president, released polling data to argue that automation is a labor issue as well as a public-safety issue: “The overwhelming majority of riders want to keep Conductors on their trains and don’t want to see staffing reduced because of automation. They don’t trust their safety and security to robots, to artificial intelligence, to technology.”
The poll found 61 percent of respondents opposed to moving to one-person crews and 61 percent opposed to fully automated trains — numbers TWU is using as leverage as it anticipates the MTA pushing for expanded one-person train operation in upcoming Local 100 contract talks.
Though there has yet to be significant legislative action around AI at the city level, elected leaders frequently call attention to it as a defining policy question for the immediate future of the workforce.
In June, the Comptroller’s office released a report detailing several possible scenarios in how AI can affect the city’s economy and workforce.
Elected Officials
Mayor Zohran Mamdani, through City Hall spokesperson Jeremy Edwards, released a statement detailing its office’s restrictive position for the use of AI in city government: “The Mamdani administration will deploy artificial intelligence only where it demonstrably improves life for New Yorkers. We will not allow its adoption at the expense of workers, our environment or our civil rights.” In practice, the mayor’s most concrete AI-related action so far has been eliminating rather than expanding a tool — shutting down the Adams-era MyCity chatbot, which he said was “functionally unusable” and “costing the administration around half a million dollars.”
Gov. Kathy Hochul, on the other hand, has sought to embrace the technology more willingly. The New York Times reported in July that the governor, through a project called Regulatory Reset, mandated the use of AI to go through documents to “modernize or eliminate obsolete regulations.”
“Across the board, the AI revolution is hitting workers like an earthquake, squeezing more efficiency out of senior staff, forcing mid-level workers to find new jobs and leaving entry-level workers out in the cold.” She has repeatedly called it a “seismic shift” on par with the Industrial Revolution, telling one business audience “almost no line of work is immune. AI can and must be a force for good. At the same time, it could literally eliminate many entry and mid-level jobs that are the pathway to the middle class and beyond.”
Comptroller Mark Levine, in the aforementioned report that his office released in June, warned that the city was unprepared for AI-caused economic disruption. The report modeled five scenarios with Moody’s Analytics that range from modest job growth to a “shockwave” outcome losing roughly 259,000-300,000 private-sector jobs and $14 billion in tax revenue by 2030 — concentrated in finance, law, and administrative work, with entry-level and clerical positions most exposed while frontline municipal roles like teaching and firefighting stay comparatively insulated:
“No city in America — and perhaps none on earth — is more exposed to both the promise and peril of artificial intelligence,” the report reads.
“AI is already having an impact on our economy and we cannot afford to sleepwalk into this new age. The enormous uncertainty that AI presents to our local economy is no excuse to not prepare.”
One of the most sustained fights over AI from labor in New York has played out in media jobs where AI protections have become as central to contract fights as wages. The passage of the NY FAIR News Act — sponsored by state Sen. Patricia Fahy and Assemblymember Nily Rozic — marks one of the first legislative attempts to regulate how media companies use AI in news production, and it drew immediate praise from the unions and guilds representing journalists.
Union Leaders
Susan DeCarava, president of the NewsGuild of New York: “The NY FAIR News Act is a first legislative step towards holding media companies accountable for how they use artificial intelligence. As the union for news media professionals, The NewsGuild of New York believes that real journalism requires real human beings. New Yorkers from upstate to downstate deserve to trust the news they read and watch. So if media bosses want to use artificial intelligence in news gathering and analysis, then it must be under terms that are ethical, transparent, and enforceable.”
Elle Toussi, Interim Executive Director of the Freelancers Union: “The NY FAIR News Act is a win for every freelance journalist, writer, and media worker who does the hard work of keeping communities informed. Freelancers have always been on the front lines of the news economy — and they deserve a level playing field that doesn’t allow corporations to replace their labor with AI away from the public eye.”
Worker voices
Alex Nicoll, a Business Insider reporter and Insider Union shop steward, became one of the most visible rank-and-file voices in this fight after Business Insider laid off 26 percent of its unionized staff and then published AI-written news stories. He told The Chief in Dec. 2025 the practice broke the union’s contract on multiple fronts:
“Having a systematic bot doing this and writing 60 stories a week is obviously a violation of our contract but on top of that and more importantly I think it’s a violation of our readers and their trust and it’s a violation of all of us. People are feeling very threatened by the rollout of all of this, and they’re really uncomfortable with the company doing this and they’re fired up to fight it.” On the layoffs-then-AI sequencing specifically, he called it a “pretty tone-deaf combination” and described the AI rollout as the “tip of the spear” that the union intended to resist with everything at its disposal.
Julia Devarti, a Hachette Workers Coalition spokesperson and an associate editor at Little, Brown and Company, spoke with The Chief in May and described several cases where editors thought a manuscript was written by AI but they lacked clear guidelines on how to move forward. Devarti said one of the primary reasons behind their union drive was to secure protections before AI becomes entrenched in the publishing industry:
“We want to be preemptive, not reactive. We don’t want anyone to lose their jobs because the company decides it’s cheaper to replace them with AI.”