A FAccT 2025 CRAFT Session that brings together workers, organizers, and labor experts to explore how AI is transforming our workplaces and discuss strategies for collective resistance
June 23, 2025, 4:15 PM-6:30 PM UTC+3
Athens, Greece and Online
RSVP FormSession Description
AI’s impact on the labor process raises new questions about control, autonomy, and resistance. The goal of our workshop is to identify concrete possibilities for labor resistance by examining, with our participants and panelists, how AI technologies restructure work (and management), intensify exploitation, and shift the dynamics of control in everyday workplaces.
This workshop will begin with a panel discussion exploring the various ways in which AI has changed the labor process—from algorithmic management and surveillance to automation and alienation. The panelists, which will include rank-and-file workers, organizers, and labor experts, will draw from their own experiences to highlight examples of how workers have organized to resist AI in the workplace and AI-empowered management practices. Through contracts and bargaining fights, worker-led mutual aid efforts, grievances and unfair labor practice (ULP) charges, and a variety of other methods, workers can contest the harms of AI alongside other workplace issues including compensation, working schedules, and technologies of surveillance and management.
In the second part of our workshop, we will translate insights and strategies from the panel conversation to participants’ own workplace conditions through our AI Workers’ Inquiry exercise. We follow Marx’s 1880 “workers’ inquiry” – a set of questions about workers’ working conditions, experiences of exploitation, their role in the value-production process, and the opportunities for collective response through workers’ councils and strikes. Marx’s survey has subsequently been a point of inspiration for workers to facilitate collective sense-making about their conditions as well as to perform the spadework for resistance and ways to build power in their own workplaces.
Schedule
The workshop will be held on Monday, June 23, 2025 from 4:15 PM – 6:30 PM UTC+3. The workshop will span approximately 2 hours, with the following agenda:
- Icebreaker & Introduction (10 min)
- Panel Discussion (50 min)
- Break (15 min)
- Introduction to Marx’s Workers’ Inquiry (10 min)
- Breakout Groups (30 min)
- Final Group Discussion (20 min)
- Social Event (19:30-21:00) @ Clumsies Bar, Praxitelous 30, Athina 105 61
Panelists
- Anna Iovine, Ziff Davis Creators Guild / NewsGuild of New York
- Joan Kinyua, Data Labelers Association
- Michelle Mahon, National Nurses United
- Britt Paris from American Association of University Professors
- Ben Harnett from New York Times Tech Guild
Organizers
- Alex Hanna, Distributed AI Research Institute
- Clarissa Redwine, Collective Action in Tech
- Linda Huber, University of Michigan
- Nathan Kim, University of Michigan
- Cella Sum, CMU / Collective Action in Tech
- JS Tan, MIT / Collective Action in Tech
- Justine Zhang, University of Michigan
- Gena Kim, University of Michigan
- Sophie Song, Distributed AI Research Institute
- Shreya Chowdhary, University of Michigan
- Bria Massey, Carnegie Mellon University
- Francesca Lameiro, University of Michigan