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The Judges' Book

Abstract

“It’s like magic.” In August 2014, the New York Times reported on how Kronos scheduling software—which uses which uses real-time inputs, including weather forecasts, historical sales data, and nearby events, to predict customer traffic—had created a “chronic crisis over the clock” for Starbucks’s 130,000 baristas. For one barista, Jannette Navarro, the Kronos app controlled everything from how much sleep her four-year-old son might get to what groceries she could afford that month. The software was installed directly onto workers’ personal phones without consultation, negotiation, or notice. What seemed “like magic” to a Kronos executive wreaked havoc on workers’ lives.

A decade later, AI-powered workplace technologies have multiplied far beyond scheduling software. From autonomous bussing robots to AI-powered surveillance cameras, algorithmic management systems, and wearable sensors that track workers’ movements in real time, employers now wield an expanding suite of emerging technologies to optimize every dimension of the labor process—often at direct cost to workers’ health, safety, privacy, wages, and rights. In the quest to maximize productivity, these technologies minimize workers’ autonomy, dignity, and legal protections. And they land hardest on the workers least equipped to resist them: the nearly 26 million low-wage workers in the United States who, overwhelmingly, lack union representation.

This Chapter examines the undertheorized intersection of artificial intelligence and low-wage work and proposes a framework of governance and guardrails to mitigate harms. The Chapter makes two core contributions: first, it establishes why low-wage, non-union workers are distinctively and disproportionately harmed by emerging workplace technologies, and second, it enumerates a multi-pronged framework for meaningful legal and regulatory responses.

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