Congress Hears From CWA’s Director of Government Affairs

Earlier this week, CWA’s Director of Government Affairs Dan Mauer provided testimony during a hearing before the U.S. House Committee on Ways and Means. During the hearing, titled “Maintaining American Innovation and Technology Leadership,” Mauer focused his remarks on the role of trade policy in protecting and promoting the American workforce while providing much-needed guidance for worker protections both at home and abroad, especially in relation to the use of artificial intelligence.

Mauer cited conditions for workers at Teleperformance subsidiary LanguageLine Solutions who are fighting for their rights despite facing poverty-level wages, wage theft, and being prevented from taking bathroom or meal breaks. He also highlighted the efforts of workers behind artificial intelligence systems at companies like Telus and the Hitachi subsidiary GlobalLogic to organize and improve their working conditions. These workers frequently must work at least two jobs to make ends meet, and they face unclear evaluation metrics, inadequate training, and unsustainable time pressures.

Said Mauer, “We’ve seen an explosion in the use of digital workplace surveillance tools such as keystroke and camera monitoring, surveillance of workers’ social media, and automated productivity metrics that create unsustainable workloads, while companies have increasingly shifted managerial duties to automated software, including reassigning work tasks, hiring, firing, and discipline.

“We’ve also seen societal harm,” added Mauer, “from large language models encouraging users to take their own lives, disseminating fake news and images, child sexual abuse material being widely disseminated online, and more.”

He called on committee members to advocate for policies governing the digital economy that protect good jobs, worker and human rights, and transparent markets.

Click here to watch Dan Mauer’s testimony.

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This post originally appeared on cwa-union.org.