‘Are You With Us, the Workers, Or Are You With the Big Tech Billionaires?’
"We need a comprehensive worker-centered approach to AI," AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler said in an interview. "So if lawmakers aren’t going to do it, then we’re going to do it."
By Victoria Guida
Liz Shuler, who leads the largest labor coalition in the country, has a warning for politicians hoping to run in 2028: The next two years will be a “which-side-are-you-on moment.”
The AFL-CIO president is laser-focused on how artificial intelligence could reshape the workforce, a topic she said is a “litmus test” heading into the next presidential election. The goal, she said, is avoiding the same kind of disruptive pain that workers experienced during globalization, when people saw their jobs outsourced while the government provided little in terms of a safety net.
“It’s just moving so fast, and we can’t let it get away from us without us,” she said in an interview Friday evening. “We definitely can see a world where there will be like seven or eight billionaires controlling everything. The power imbalance is already tilted toward corporations and the wealthy, and this is just going to exacerbate inequality.”
Shuler, who campaigned this year alongside Democratic candidates like Ohio’s Sherrod Brown and Texas’ James Talarico, said she sees an opportunity to build bipartisan support for AI-related worker protections, given voter anxieties over what a technological revolution will mean for them. After early victories in California, she said the AFL-CIO plans to take the policy fight to more states and build momentum at the federal level.
“People are very, very anxious. They’re frustrated,” Shuler said. “This is a moment for some unconventional and unusual allies coming together.”
Still, building consensus in the months ahead will be a slog, especially in Washington. Voters are expected to hand control of one or both chambers of Congress to Democrats on Tuesday, resulting in divided government and an even steeper path to legislating than before.
And she illustrated how tricky it will be for lawmakers even within the Democratic Party to navigate disagreements on one of the issues they’ve collectively campaigned on — opposition to President Donald Trump’s tariffs — by declining to specify how aggressively she’d like to see them rolled back.
More broadly, the union leader said lawmakers need to show they’re fighting for policies that will bring down costs and boost wages — split-party control be damned.
“It’s really about the package of working-class economic issues that gets brought up, debated, and passed,” she said. “And then if it ends up getting vetoed, then, which side people are on?”
This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
What are your priorities for the next Congress?
We’ve been working overtime, of course, on these races all across the country to really center a working-class economic agenda in the campaign. So it only makes sense that when the next Congress starts, that that translates to a union-made, people-powered agenda for the legislature.
It’s very much centered around the bread-and-butter economic issues that you report on, and it’s obviously costs and things being too expensive: gas, groceries, rent, health care. But it’s also the second piece of it that travels with it, which is pay not keeping up with inflation.
All these candidates have to deliver on the promises that they’ve made on the campaign trail.
The labor movement has long been a huge source of support for tariffs as an economic policy tool. But the AFL-CIO has spoken out against some of the sweeping moves taken by the Trump administration. How much of what’s been done would you like to see undone?
We’ve often talked about tariffs, as you said, as a tool, but the way they’ve been utilized with this administration’s approach hasn’t been strategic and hasn’t been used with countries that aren’t playing by the rules, like China, and instead are being used against our friends like Canada. And that’s never been the labor movement’s philosophy.
We look at it as a strategic tool that you use on an industry or sector basis to remedy or level the playing field. So we would support the tariffs that have helped certain industries like steel and autos and some of the things we’ve long complained about being subject to unfair competition. But we also think that reckless tariffs can be very damaging to the economy in other areas, like we’ve seen with these across-the-board approaches.
There’s some discussions in the Democratic Party, of course, as to their posture as a party because they’ve never quite been able to get the approach calibrated so that working people hear in their approach that they want to actually help create jobs, not offshore jobs.
We want to use tariffs as a way to bring jobs back to the U.S.
I think that was what workers were listening for in the last presidential election, and the messaging just didn’t quite land with working people because it was all focused on how it would affect retailers and prices for consumer goods, not as much about the impact on jobs.
That’s something that we have to really look closely at and think about as we start to pivot into a new Congress and then, ultimately, a presidential election in 2028.
I take it from what you’re saying that most of the tariffs the Trump administration has put on should be removed, and there’s selective stuff that should be kept. Is that a fair way of thinking about what you’re saying?
I would have to consult with some of our trade experts to really drill down into what sectors stay the same and what we would advocate for rolling back. It gets very detailed very fast, and we have unions who are steeped in this, that live and breathe this every single day and have seen the impacts on their workforce, and so we would want to be probably more careful in how we characterize that.
I’m just saying, without being specific, is it that most of the tariffs should go away?
I don’t know that I would say most. I would say the reckless approach, where it’s been more of a scattershot approach, is something we don’t agree with, and yeah, we think a strategic use of tariffs makes more sense.
I also want to ask about AI. You’ve been vocal about the dangers for workers, but there’s also been some benefits for workers, including that data center construction is employing a lot of tradespeople. So, does that temper your feelings, your policy positions about the technology at all?
Well, I don’t conflate data center construction with AI and technology’s impact on the workplace as much as people do in the press. I feel like the debate has been merged into one because the data center construction has been used as a lever to try to slow things down or control the debate.
People are seeing these data centers up in their communities, so it’s front and center, right there in their face. And if they’re not done responsibly, and they’re not built with high-road standards and companies paying their fair share, then absolutely, it’s an issue of concern. And we keep saying they can be built responsibly with union jobs and high-road strategies and tax policy that supports the community and electricity and water policy that makes the companies pay their fair share.
But that data backbone is going to be built no matter what, and it’s either going to be built in places in the U.S. that can do it responsibly or it could be built overseas where forced labor is used, and we’re still using a data backbone that’s being imported or utilized from afar. So I think that debate is an infrastructure debate.
To me, the more troublesome thing is that people are focused on data centers and how they’re constructed and where they’re constructed, while these tech billionaires are running away with unregulated use of AI in every aspect of our lives, including the workplace. And not many people are paying close attention to that.
This is going to disrupt every industry, every sector, every type of job. And right now, no one is talking about the guardrails that we’re going to need to protect workers, to protect our privacy, the data usage and how it’s collected, where it’s used, if it’s sold. There’s so much that’s happening around us that policymakers and elected officials have not addressed.
That’s the real debate that we should be focusing on.
You said recently that the AFL is drafting gold-standard AI legislation. What are the priorities there?
There’s a lot of folks who are introducing bills that are dealing with one particular aspect of AI, like the frontier models or the national security implications or child safety. It’s bills taking a slice of this. And we keep saying that we need a comprehensive worker-centered approach to AI. So if lawmakers aren’t going to do it, then we’re going to do it. And so we’re working internally with our unions to say, “What would that look like?”
And we’ve got to do it quickly, right? Because these technologies are becoming more and more sophisticated every day. And while we debate what should be done, these technologies are moving faster and faster. And so we’re saying we need to actually get ahead of this ourselves and put workers out in front.
So, you’re still in the information-gathering phase from your members?
We are beginning drafting on the worker protections piece of this. And we’ve been at this at the state level for several years now. So we’re moving on both fronts at the state legislative level and then also preparing for the federal level. But we can take lessons learned from what we’ve experimented with in these state legislative laboratories, right? And we were successful in California passing four guardrail types of bills that start to scratch the surface of what’s needed.
This legislative session will be expanding on that at the state level and taking a more holistic approach with our state and local AFL-CIO bodies to get in the halls of power at the state level and start going on offense.
With a lot of the anti-data-center sentiment and a lot of the AI anxiety that’s going into these elections, do you think there could be bipartisan support for some of the stuff that you’re talking about?
Yes, I do. I was thinking about this recently, about in the ’90s when we went through this period of deindustrialization due to trade policy. And you know this better than anyone, right? That with the offshoring and manufacturing leaving the country, the good high-road union jobs that you didn’t need a college degree for went away. And there were a whole host of people — thousands of people — that were left basically on their own. We had no safety net, no pathways for good jobs to transition to. I mean, there was [Trade Adjustment Assistance] that was completely inadequate. So, what did we learn from that experience?
Mostly, people were like, “Oh, manufacturing. That’s yesteryear. We’re moving on to better jobs.” And we ended up actually in a situation where people were piecing together jobs in retail and the service sector and never could recover from what they lost. And so now, fast-forward to today, with the disruption we’re going to be seeing with AI and these technologies: There’s going to be a whole host of white-collar workers, young people who are graduating college with tons of debt, that can’t find a job. A lot of women in back-office jobs that were supporting their families with payroll and accounting and call center work. They are going to be the first to feel these impacts.
It’s a whole different conversation now that we’re talking about white-collar work, and I say that to say that people are waking up to this in a different way now, and it is crossing party lines. It is crossing people’s backgrounds and class. And so I think it is ripe for coalition-building in unconventional ways because people have a common fight.
You mentioned TAA a minute ago, and I do wonder: Have we actually learned concrete lessons from what happened on trade? The general takeaway was basically, there were winners and losers from trade, and society didn’t do enough to support the losers. But is there actually an answer of what you do to prevent that from happening again?
Yeah, this is part of our “gold standard.” We want to come up with the policy levers learning from that experience. People talk about climate transition, a just transition. Well, we need that kind of just transition for people who are displaced as a result of AI and technology.
Experimenting with things like wage replacement, where you can bridge people while they’re pursuing a pathway to a new career. Thinking about levers that we can institute around employers and the fact that employers are operating in a system where they have zero incentive to keep workers on their payroll. They look at AI as a tool to essentially shed workers and cut costs and capture productivity gains using technology that just improves their bottom line and their profitability. They’re not thinking about, “Oh, well, maybe I can hang on to this employee and help them transition to another type of job that’s AI-enabled.” That’s not the instinct of most employers.
So, are there policy levers, for example, that we could institute that creates a higher threshold for employers to be firing people? These are the kinds of ideas that we’re working on now.
Most people don’t have the luxury of being able to train full time and be able to support their families. Are there ways that we can support and sustain people as they learn a new field or they’re plussing up their skills for the next thing? As a society, we should be thinking about, what kinds of investments are we prepared to make, having been through this before?
And this is definitely going to be something we’ll be talking about as the presidential candidates start to emerge as well. This is our litmus test. It’s like, “Are you with us, the workers, or are you with the Big Tech billionaires?” It’s a which-side-are-you-on moment.
I wanted to ask you about that. What are the topics that you will be pressing 2028 candidates on the most?
Well, the affordability issues, the kitchen-table economic issues are not going away.
This is going to continue into 2027, and then certainly if you layer on the AI impacts, it’s going to be a 2028 issue.
We will continue to beat the drum on the fact that people need a raise. The minimum wage has not been raised. People need to be able to join unions and not be fired, like they are under these broken labor laws, and be able to get a first contract once they do unionize. Because employers, they stall, and they have no consequences so just drag their feet.
Things like health care, where we are in a completely broken system and costs continue to skyrocket. Health care and housing are two of the most salient issues, I would say, for people when we talk to workers about what keeps them up at night — and then, of course, immigration, because we have seen the policies of today that are completely broken. Our hope for comprehensive immigration reform with a pathway to citizenship continues to be alive, and we’ll continue to fight for that.
And then the AI of it all I think will take front and center stage as 2028 takes shape.
Assuming Democrats do well on Tuesday, where would you like to see them focus their oversight agenda?
There’s a lot of discussion about the oversight piece. I think we should be spending more time delivering on what we talked about on the campaign trail, which is, real impacts for working people.
We need to make sure that we’re bringing down costs, we’re raising people’s wages, we’re expanding health care. Making sure that people can join a union. That’s how we actually will show that we’ve made a difference. And that agenda is what I think people are hungry for.
Oversight of the Trump administration is important, of course, and actually, corruption is one of the issues that’s really been bubbling out on the campaign trail. Mainly because people are watching the rich and the powerful become more rich and powerful while they’re struggling to pay their bills. And I think that self-dealing is a huge driver for people. So that’s definitely a piece of what [we] probably will be seeing in the next Congress. But we just want to make sure that the economic issues stay front and center.
