Yesterday, the House Education and Workforce Subcommittee on Health, Employment, Labor, and Pensions held a hearing entitled, “Building an AI-Ready America: Adopting AI at Work,” examining how AI is being deployed across the employment landscape and what that means for productivity, job quality, and worker protections.
Subcommittee Chair Rick Allen (R-GA) emphasized balancing innovation with worker safeguards, including the continued applicability of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) and the importance of improved federal data collection to understand AI’s workforce impacts, while Ranking Member Mark DeSaulnier (D-CA) warned that unchecked AI adoption could widen power imbalances through surveillance, privacy intrusions, and discriminatory outcomes absent worker input and government guardrails.
Witnesses outlined competing approaches. Bradford Kelley of Littler Mendelson argued that existing federal workplace laws, including Title VII, the NLRA, and the Fair Labor Standards Act, are largely sufficient to address AI-related misconduct and cautioned that premature or fragmented AI-specific regulation could stifle innovation and create compliance uncertainty. Revana Sharfuddin of the Mercatus Center contended that current federal data systems are insufficient to measure AI’s task-level effects on workers and recommended targeted investments in Bureau of Labor Statistics and Census Bureau surveys to better track AI adoption, job redesign, and labor-market impacts. Tanya Goldman of Workshop emphasized that workers are already experiencing harm from opaque AI-driven hiring, wage setting, surveillance, and algorithmic management, and called for stronger enforcement resources, transparency and disclosure requirements, human oversight and appeal rights, regular impact assessments, and preservation of states’ ability to enact additional worker protections.