New documentary focuses on AI’s racist roots
https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/technology/todays-ai-harms-linked-in-new-film-to-racist-roots/article_50f120e8-9e9b-4d2e-98f3-18db56764c67.html
By Troy Wolverton | Examiner staff writer 4 hrs ago
A still image from "Ghost in the …Machine," a new documentary from filmmaker Valerie Veatch that takes a critical look at the artificial-intelligence industry and the origins of the technology.
Courtesy of Valerie Veatch
The negative effects of artificial intelligence — environmental degradation, its use in war — are an inevitable result of its creators’ guiding philosophy, according to a new documentary.
In her new film, “Ghost in the Machine,” documentarian Valerie Veatch makes the case that such downsides are a natural consequence of the ideology that’s driven the technology’s development and how its developers have viewed the world, one of white supremacy and dehumanization.
In the work, which debuted at the Sundance Film Festival in January, she advances the proposition that the idea of general intelligence and the statistical tools used to attempt to measure it — which are foundational both to the idea of creating a “human-level” artificial general intelligence and the statistical models underlying the technology — came out of eugenics.
And she asserts that many of the key figures in the history of AI’s development — including William Shockley, who essentially founded Silicon Valley, and John McCarthy, who coined the term “artificial intelligence” — were either directly tied to eugenicists or openly expressed racist or misogynistic ideas.
Documentarian Valerie Veatch said seeing OpenAI's Sora video-generation system "whitewash" depictions of people of color and sexualize images of women prompted her to dig into the origins of artificial-intelligence technology and why it produces such outputs.
Courtesy of Valerie Veatch
Veatch, whose previous works looked critically at social media, said she didn’t set out to make a negative film about AI. Instead, she said, she followed her research, which included digging into archives and interviewing dozens of experts — many of whom have written critically of the technology.
In advance of the film’s online screening March 27, on AI Literacy Day, The Examiner spoke with Veatch about the work, her views on AI, and her choice to intersperse real and AI-generated footage within the film. The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Why make a film about AI and its dangers? October 2024, my friend signed me up for the Sora early access program for OpenAI, where we were testing this top-secret technology that was meant to revolutionize the film industry. Playing around with [it, it created] highly sexist and racist videos [unbidden]. I was like, “Wow, what is this crazy technology?” As a female filmmaker and a feminist, all of my critical-theory bells started ringing.
The kind of feedback I got was very much like, “Oh, it’s kind of cringe to be asking these questions,” or, “There’s really nothing that we can do. All AI functions on bias, and you’re being silly talking about this.”
And so I just started researching and looking around. One of the first papers I came across was Abeba Birhane’s paper on how misogyny makes its way into datasets.
I started cold emailing various folks who’d written papers that I thought were really interesting. I ended up talking to like 40 of the most amazing, wonderful academics and philosophers and linguists and sociologists. By the end of it, I was so amazed to see that a film had formed out of these conversations, and that everybody is telling the story altogether, like a chorus.
It sounds like you went into it with a somewhat critical eye, especially after your Sora experience. To what extent do you think that influenced who you talked to and the perspectives that are told in the film? It’s interesting that you say that, because I really wanted this technology to be this liberatory, emergent vessel for all of human knowledge. All of the rhetoric around LLMs was something I really wanted to be true. I didn’t want it to be the story it ended up being.
From where I’m sitting, there isn’t a way that you can look at this technology and walk away being like, “Well, there’s actually another side to this,” or like, “Let’s take a more balanced view,” because this is a technology that is rotten from the core. It is extractive. It is [exploitative]. It relies on colonial logics and the logics of eugenics and race science.
One of the interesting visual choices you made was to go back and forth between AI-generated imagery and real imagery. You have these consistent labels of “AI” and “Not AI” you use in the film. What was your thinking with that? Well, it was a provocation. I initially was like, obviously, don’t want to touch the stuff. AI is terrible. It looks awful. It gives you this ick feeling watching it. And especially after my experience with OpenAI, I was like, “Gross!” But there’s a tradition in feminist video art of turning the aesthetic of the oppressor upon itself.
Documentary ties the technology to eugenics.
www.sfexaminer.comKambiz Sakhai On US Israel War On Iran & The Iranian Working Class
Capitalists Want Attacks on Labor, Bay Area taxpayers aren’t getting good value for their BART spending
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2026/03/14/bart-sales-tax-referendum-bay-area-rapid-transit/
The death of Bay Area public transportation
Massive service cuts loom …despite a surge in local government spending.
March 14, 2026 at 2:45 p.m. EDTToday at 2:45 p.m. EDT
A BART train in Oakland. (Ben Margot/AP)
It looks like the Bay Area Rapid Transit system is headed for a financial death spiral. High costs and low ridership have pushed the transit authority to threaten major service cuts – unless wary voters approve a regressive tax hike in November. This farce was predictable but not inevitable.
The conversations animating the Editorial Board, delivered to your inbox every Tuesday
BART has served greater San Francisco for more than half a century, and there was a time when it was mostly self-sustaining. As recently as 2019, a fare covered about three-quarters of the operating expense of a trip. The system has hiked fares, but the cost of any given trip has soared because ridership has collapsed. That’s why BART’s leaders want to raise the sales tax across all five counties that it serves by at least half a percentage point.
Few signs suggest that riders are coming back. Public transit use is down across the country, but most other systems are closer to pre-pandemic levels. The Bay Area, however, is filled with technology firms that offer generous work-from-home policies.
About three-quarters of BART’s operating expenses come from labor, and those costs have soared as ridership fell. BART had total operating expenses of $883 million in 2024. It spent over $150 million more on labor that year than it did in 2019, despite passengers completing 73 million fewer trips.
This destructive inefficiency is not entirely BART’s fault. Longstanding federal law makes it difficult for any public transit agency that receives federal money to cut its workforce. Nationwide since the 1960s, the total number of transit trips is approximately the same, but operating costs have quintupled, largely driven by labor costs.
BART now has an annual structural deficit of about $400 million. That’s a lot, but it pales in comparison to overall spending by governments in counties served by BART.
The City and County of San Francisco had a balanced budget in 2012. Government spending has grown by 54 percent since then. That is adjusted for inflation. It is not adjusted for population growth, because the population is basically the same.
Despite having a similar population, the city-county government had 27 percent more workers in 2025 than it had in 2012. Their average compensation is $205,000. They aren’t helping the transit situation, as one-quarter of them work from home two or more days of the week.
Meanwhile, San Francisco is asking residents to approve a full percentage point increase to their sales tax rates so that they can also bail out the Muni, which operates buses, street cars and subway trains.
Just comparing budgets from immediately before the pandemic in 2019 to 2024, the five counties BART serves were collectively spending over $9 billion per year more, adjusted for inflation. They achieved this despite the region having a stagnant population. Politicians should be asking themselves whether all that new spending was more important than BART before trying to saddle their residents with higher taxes.
Voters in Oakland already approved a sales tax increase last year, taking the combined rate in the city to 10.75 percent. That’s one of the highest rates in the country, and it’s 1.5 percentage points above the maximum rate allowed by California law. Local governments routinely ask for exemptions from that cap, however, and the state has been too happy to oblige.
Technologically, there’s a solution to transit costs. A 2023 study funded by the federal government concluded that “automation is a proven transit technology that not only reduces operations costs but can also improve service quality.” Automated trains aren’t some kind of AI innovation. They’re already normal in other parts of the world. Automation reduces operation costs by 46 percent, the study found, based on the financials of successful systems in Vancouver and Copenhagen.
Politicians would need to stand up to transit unions, repeal the federal law hindering labor cuts and set aside money for the one-time costs of transitioning to automated service. Maybe when the alternative is closing down transit systems altogether, they’ll see the light.
For the amount of taxes Bay Area residents already pay, they should have a well-run public transit system. Yet BART has been treated more like a jobs program for transit workers than a way for people to get around. That culture of contempt for the public is why bureaucrats treat never-ending tax hikes like the mob does protection payments.
Massive service cuts loom despite a surge in local government spending.
www.washingtonpost.comInternational Alliance in Support of Workers in Iran
·https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=1558009769486433&set=a.556367096317377
⚫️ Death of a hardworking teacher from Tabriz following US-Israel airstrikes
Following the airstrike on Thursday, March 4th, in Tabriz, Ms. …#Neda_Aminiazar, a dedicated educator from East Azerbaijan province, suffered severe injuries due to the intensity of the explosion and its shockwave while passing through Shahid Kasaei highway and was transferred to medical centers.
After enduring pain and injuries from this incident for several days, Ms. Aminiazar passed away in the early hours of Thursday, March 11th.
The Coordination Council of Iranian Teachers Trade Associations, while commemorating the memory of this teacher, strongly condemns military actions against civilians and educators and expresses its solidarity with Ms. Aminiazar's family and the educational community of East Azerbaijan province.
The Coordination Council of Iranian Teachers Trade Associations
🆔 @kashowranews
#stopbombingiran #stopwar #NoToWar #iran #CeasefireNow
Korean Hyundai workers, residents in Ulsan fear impact of robots' arrival at US factories
https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/southkorea/society/20260314/hyundai-workers-residents-in-ulsan-fear-impact-of-robots-arrival-at-us-factories
By Hankookilbo
Published Mar 14, 2026 12:05 am …KST
Joo Jung-hee, owner of a local diner near the main gate of Hyundai Motor in Buk-gu, Ulsan, cleans her restaurant on March 3. Korea Times photo by Choi Ju-yeon
“We weren’t even shaken during COVID. It somehow just passed us by,” said Joo Jung-hee, an 80-year-old restaurant owner. “That’s because of the factory workers.”
Running a small restaurant in Ulsan, a city whose economy revolves around six major Hyundai Motor factories, Joo has rarely worried about sales. Even with pain-relief patches on hands darkened by age spots, she still smiles at the sight of customers streaming in each day, metimes swallowing a handful of painkillers before returning to work.
Inside the modest 82-square-meter restaurant, ten steel tables fill quickly at lunchtime. Factory workers tired of cafeteria food come for Joo’s pollack stew or ft tofu up, and the place turns into mething like a neighborhood living room. Over the years serving out food, she now knows when the next seasonal promotion is.
Restaurants nearby have changed owners several times in the past year alone. But Joo has held on to her spot, which sits directly across from the factory gates for three decades.
For her, Ulsan was the city that made it possible to raise three sons. She arrived alone at 17 from the foothills of Songnisan in North Chungcheong Province after hearing that in Ulsan there were always jobs and always something to do. In those years the city carried a simple promise: work hard enough, and anyone could become middle class.
Atlas humanoid robot moves inside Hyundai Motor Group’s exhibition booth during the Consumer Electronics Show 2026 in Las Vegas. Yonhap
After decades in the business, bad news rarely unsettles her. But something she heard two months ago made her pause — that human-shaped robots may soon enter the factory floor.
She stopped for a moment before speaking.
“If robots go into the factory, of course it will hurt us,” she said. “People have to be around to eat. If there are only robots, who’s going to come for lunch?”
Her words carry a simple truth. Robots are unlikely to order fermented soybean stew or drink soju with coworkers after a shift. A pandemic can pass. But a factory filled with machines instead of people may be a change that cannot easily be reversed.
Joo knows how closely her business follows the rhythm of the plant. Nine out of ten customers come from the factory, and on days when production lines stop, she prepares far less stew and fewer side dishes.
Customers fill a diner near the main gate of Hyundai Motor in Buk-gu, Ulsan, on March 3. Korea Times photo by Choi Ju-yeon
Across northern Ulsan, where the city’s factories are concentrated, the same unease is spreading.
“Robots don’t ride taxis or rent one-room apartments,” said a taxi driver met in Ulsan. “If people disappear, Ulsan’s economy will collapse.”
Six Hyundai Motor factories employing about 40,000 workers are clustered in Yangjeong-dong, the neighborhood where Joo’s restaurant is located.
Workers leave Hyundai Motor’s Ulsan Plant No. 4 after finishing their shifts on March 3. Korea Times photo by Choi Ju-yeon
Robots threaten the hands of 30-year veterans
“When the news came out that Hyundai Motor planned to deploy Atlas at its U.S. factories by 2028, the reaction among colleagues was strange. The idea was that human workers would be reduced, and the stock price went up. We didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.”
Park Tae-gyun, 52, a full-time worker in Hyundai Motor, still remembers the mood on the factory floor when Atlas was unveiled in January at CES 2026, the world’s largest consumer electronics and information technology trade show.
The humanoid robot, equipped with 56 joints, lifted a box and twisted its waist nearly 180 degrees before placing it behind its back. It looked a lot more efficient and stronger than human workers who suffer chronic pain in the back, shoulders and wrist.
What Park felt was not awe, but a chill.
Park is well connected around the company and usually in the loop about workplace developments. But he first learned through the news that the company plans to deploy the robots at overseas factories within two years.
Even the labor union knew little about the plan. The company had never explained it.
A colleague sitting next to Park, Yoon Han-sup, 59, added:
"When we were eating in the cafeteria, they kept showing videos on the screens of robots doing backflips or robot dogs running around,” he said. “I remember thinking, ‘Why are they playing that?’ But looking back, it felt like they were trying to get us used to the idea. So, when I heard about Atlas, I thought, ‘Well, I guess what was coming has finally arrived.’”
When the humanlike robot appeared, unease spread across the factory floor. For now, the company says it will be introduced at a plant in the United States, but workers believe it could eventually arrive in Korea as well.
What exactly the robot might be able to do inside the factory remained unclear. Standing about 190 centimeters tall and weighing 90 kilograms, it can lift loads of up to 50 kilograms and move at roughly twice the walking speed of an adult.
Still, after nearly three decades working with machines and grease, Park felt he could guess the answer.
“It’ll probably be able to do just about anything.”
From left, hands of Joo Jung-hee, a diner owner in Ulsan, a Hyundai Motor factory worker in Ulsan, and the humanoid robot Atlas / Korea Times photo by Kang Ji-soo and courtesy of Boston Dynamics
For many workers, the only thing they still trust is their hands.
Park Min-gu (a pseudonym), 58, who assembles shock absorbers on the factory line, looked down at his own — thick and bent from decades of labor. The Korean term workers use is “shoba,” a suspension part that absorbs impact when a car travels on rough roads.
After 35 years of heavy work, the experience and sweat of the job seem embedded in the tips of his fingers. The tactile sense built over years on the line is something even the most advanced robot may struggle to replicate.
Yoon allowed himself a small note of hope.
“The hardest stage in building a car is the final assembly,” he said. “That’s when workers connect the wiring and install things like the seats and dashboard onto the painted body. In the end, it’s work done with human fingers.
“Tightening small bolts or snapping connectors into place — plugging bundles of wires into parts inside the body — may look simple, but it takes delicate hand skills and a certain feel.
“Years ago, the factory once brought in part-time workers on weekends to keep up with production. Back then, a saying went around: ‘Customers don’t buy cars made on Saturdays.’ You have to apply just the right amount of pressure when tightening bolts, and the temporary workers didn’t have that sense.
“Other stages like body assembly have already become highly automated. But in final assembly, there’s still a lot of work that people have to do.”
A view of the production line for the Santa Fe, Tucson and Avante at Hyundai Motor’s Ulsan Plant No. 2 in Ulsan, South Korea / Yonhap
But even then, workers are well aware even value of human hands will not last forever.
Jung Sung-yong, 54, who works on a production line assembling the midsize SUV Hyundai Santa Fe, recalled the shock he felt during a visit to the Hyundai Motor Group Innovation Center Singapore.
“They were converting what humans feel into pressure data and storing it,” he said. “It looked like they were analyzing exactly how much force is needed to fasten each part, then feeding those numbers into robots.”
“In the end, there may be nothing left that only humans can do,” he said. “Eventually it will become a fully automated factory where only robots are moving.”
The idea of a fully unmanned factory is not simply the anxious imagination of workers.
Hyundai Motor has reportedly discussed a project known as “DF247,” an initiative envisioning a plant that runs continuously without human presence. The concept involves a so-called “dark factory,” where robots operate production lines around the clock, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, without even turning on the lights.
Hyundai Motor said the DF247 project does not mean a fully unmanned factory. Instead, the company said its goal is an autonomously operated plant where people and automation technologies work together.
Robots to debut at non-union U.S. plant, contract workers likely hit first
Public opinion is not favorable towards factory workers. Some say they are simply digging their heels.
One line from the union’s stance, albeit wrongly framed, has stuck in many people’s minds: “Not a single Atlas robot should be allowed onto the factory floor.”
Criticisms arose that the labor union is being too greedy and acting selfishly against innovation when they themselves are a “privileged union,” many earning more than 100 million won (around $68,000).
Some employees at subcontractors even cynically say labor union members often demand molds be redesigned because small parts, such as trunk latch components, are inconvenient to handle, but with robots, such won’t happen.
Factory workers voice frustration, saying things aren’t that simple.
Behind the anger lies a deeper anxiety. For workers, the issue is a matter of livelihood, yet the company has offered little explanation about what is happening.
“No one knew Atlas was going to be introduced until we heard about it in the news. Even now, nobody knows exactly which processes it will handle or how workers’ roles will change,” said Park, his face set.
The collective bargaining agreement between Hyundai Motor and the union states that both sides must hold discussions and reach a joint decision when new technology is introduced. It also calls for the formation of an Employment Stability Committee to develop measures to safeguard jobs, he said.
“The labor union opposing the deployment of Atlas without labor-management agreement is a sensical argument. We’re not trying to start a Luddite movement.”
Trucks move in and out of the main gate of Hyundai Motor’s Ulsan Plant No. 4 on March 3. Korea Times photo by Choi Ju-yeon
Robots are set to be deployed at Hyundai Motor’s new plant in Georgia in the United States, where there is no union likely to oppose their introduction. But workers in Korea are likely to feel the impact soon as well.
“My pay could be cut right away,” said Kim Chang-sup (a pseudonym), 37, a full-time employee at the company.
According to Kim, production at Ulsan No.1 has already been shipped off to plants in the U.S. by a significant amount. When robots are adopted, it is likely that even more volume will be done there.
“We live on overtime pay. Our wages work more like hourly pay than fixed monthly salary. Less volume means less pay, but company is not offering any alternatives.”
According to the labor union, about 40 percent of Hyundai Motor employee’s salary is variable compensation, including bonuses and overtime or weekend work allowances.
Ironically, full-time workers are in a relatively better position, said Yoon. They are likely to be the last to feel the impact of robots, as workers outside the union are expected to be pushed out first.
“Contract workers will be affected first. Then it will spread to suppliers and parts makers. The people who have quietly worked in the most vulnerable jobs will suffer the most.”
He said there are roughly 55,000 technical jobs within the company, though Hyundai Motor says the number is closer to 30,000. Of those, about 40,000 are full-time positions. The rest are contract workers or retirees rehired on short-term contracts, typically renewed each year.
“They’ll be out of the factory once the company decides not to renew their contracts,” he said.
This article from the Hankook Ilbo, the sister publication of The Korea Times, is translated by a generative AI system and edited by The Korea Times.
“We weren’t even shaken during COVID. It somehow just passed us by,” said Joo Jung-hee, an 80-year-old restaurant owner. “That’s because of…
www.koreatimes.co.krReady to rumble: The 37 most powerful labor leaders in San Francisco
https://sfstandard.com/2026/03/12/san-francisco-union-labor-powerful-city-hall/
Their names and faces are unknown to most San Franciscans. But these are the people who craft law, elect politicians, and run city-shaking …strikes.
By Gabe Greschler and Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez
Visuals by Jess Hutchison and Taylor Le
Animations by Jason Allen Lee
Additional reporting by Jonah Owen Lamb and Adam Lashinsky
Published Mar. 12, 2026•6:00am
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They can mobilize armies of foot soldiers to put a politician into office. They pour big bucks into local elections. Their pressure campaigns can shake City Hall to its foundation. They can call for strikes that disrupt day-to-day life. But their names and faces are unknown to the vast majority of San Franciscans whose lives their work directly touches.
They are the rulers of San Francisco’s most powerful labor unions, one of the least understood sources of influence in city politics and beyond.
The city and surrounding region have long been considered a union powerhouse. The San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont metropolitan area was home to 329,473 union workers as of 2024, according to the UC Berkeley Labor Center. That’s 12.4% of the area’s workforce, above the national average of 10% in 2025. Nearly all of San Francisco’s roughly 34,000 city workers are represented by unions. And out in front of this vast army of laborers are a select few leaders, who are often seen raising fists and bullhorns on the steps at City Hall or emerging from the bargaining rooms where the real decisions are made.
Unlike elected politicians, union leaders can stick around for years. “One day, Daniel Lurie will be gone,” said one longtime labor ally. “These are institutions.”
The Standard set out to understand the forces behind the city’s labor movement. We spoke with union leaders, line staffers, City Hall insiders, and others to understand the movers and shakers of San Francisco labor.
Based on those interviews, we’ve assembled a list of 37 figures, whom we’ve placed into seven boxing-themed categories, from the heavyweights who pack the biggest punches to the cornermen offering strategy and coaching. Forgive the violent caricatures, but union leaders can be world-class grapplers, using equal parts intellect and muscle, jabs and uppercuts, to achieve their aims. Their school of martial arts contrasts with the high-stakes political poker practiced by City Hall, which we detailed in our previous list of power players, “The House of Daniel Lurie.”
The timing of this list is important: 2026 will be a watershed moment for the city’s labor factions as populist sentiment sweeps the nation, affordability remains a top issue for voters, and a business-aligned mayornavigates the tricky political tests unions are setting out for him. Unions plan to spend big to promote their priorities for the June ballot, including their signature “Overpaid CEO Tax” measure. Meanwhile, the mayor’s charter and commission reform efforts could face stiff resistance from labor. On top of it all, the city’s $877 million budget deficit is prompting layoffs, teeing up a major showdown between workers and City Hall.
Let’s get ready to rrrrumble!
These are labor’s knockout artists: Historically important leaders whose impact is felt not just within their unions but throughout the entire political ecosystem.
Mike Casey
President of the San Francisco Labor Council. Represents: 100,000-plus citywide union members. Salary: $93,699.
If San Francisco has labor royalty, Casey is king. At first glance, he doesn’t look like a monarch. His outfits are worn, as if they’ve been in the labor movement as long as he has — since 1986 — and his sleeves are perennially rolled up, as if he just left the picket line(opens in new tab). For two decades, he has flexed his political muscle leading the San Francisco Labor Council, an alliance of nearly every union that is vying to prevent Lurie from weakening union power by reforming the city charter, among other changes. Casey is in negotiations with the mayor’s office to stop business interests from gutting workers’ healthcare and is drawing a line in the sand over Lurie’s attempt to make it tougher to place measures on the ballot — a key tactic labor uses to raise money through parcel taxes or taxing corporations to pay for everything from staff raises to workforce housing. Casey is positioned to go toe-to-toe with City Hall: He led Unite Here for 21 years(opens in new tab), showing that striking hotel workers can bring San Francisco’s lucrative convention business to a standstill. “Our union used to have a lot of old-style union leaders who were good negotiators but who weren’t organizers,” Casey said. ”And my generation … we were organizers.”
David Canham
Executive director of SEIU 1021, cochair of SF Labor Council’s Public Employee Committee. Represents: 60,000 nurses, administrative and nonprofit staffers, and others across Northern California. Salary: $200,179.
Canham grew up in South Africa and held multiple roles at SEIU, the city’s most powerful public-sector union, before landing the executive position in 2021. While he’s not doing the boots-on-the-ground work representing the nurses and other workers of SEIU 1021, Canham is deeply influential in marshaling the city’s enormous public-sector workforce. He is among the labor officials who meet most often with Lurie during budget season, according to calendar records. Most recently, Canham’s union has thrown its weight behind the contentious Overpaid CEO Tax, spending $150,000 on a ballot measure labor says will raise $200 million for the city’s general fund. The measure has prompted a competing proposition from the city’s business community, a showdown that is likely to become one of the biggest political stories of 2026. Canham’s life partner is the next person on this list, Debra Grabelle, romantically linking two of the city’s most influential public-sector unions.
Debra Grabelle
Executive director of IFPTE Local 21, cochair of SF Labor Council’s Public Employee Committee. Represents: More than 13,000 engineers, librarians, accountants, and other government employees. Salary: $226,749.
Grabelle’s entrée to labor was helping to unionize a bread factory in Ohio. “The employer would change people’s hours the day they came to shift, which was really terrible,” she recalled. “That meant people couldn’t know when they would get off of work so they could take care of their children.” After a stint at the California Nurses Association, she was brought on in 2018 to lead the IFPTE, which reps more City Hall employees than any other union except SEIU. Grabelle calls its 6,478 San Francisco employees the “public-sector nerds.” She’s directly involved in top-level City Hall conversations during budget season, calendar records show, but is also not afraid to get her hands dirty. Last year, she was arrested alongside about a dozen others(opens in new tab) in the Board of Supervisors chambers during protests against budget cuts. “She is fiery,” said one longtime labor leader. “She doesn’t take any shit. And she’ll call out somebody if they’re speaking against workers.” Another said: “When you’re in a fight, you want Debra … but also Debra knows a deal has to be made at the end.” Grabelle’s union is supporting the Overpaid CEO Tax and will be pulling out the big guns to protest the mayor’s personnel cuts this budget season.
Cassondra Curiel
President of the United Educators of San Francisco. Represents: 6,000teachers, school counselors, campus security guards, and other school workers. Salary: $91,501 (teacher salary from SFUSD).
Those who know her swear that Curiel isn’t the firebrand she played during the recent teachers strike. She’s patient and affable, helpful traits for the decade she spent coaxing middle school students to hit the books in her English classes. But don’t underestimate her: She suffers no foolsin the San Francisco Unified School District. Politically, Curiel’s United Educators of San Francisco falls even farther to the left than most people in this liberal stronghold, a stance that landed the union on the losing end of a 2021 campaign(opens in new tab) to recall three like-minded school board commissioners. After that loss, Curiel pivoted away from electoral politics toward pure organizing. In February, her union’s roughly 6,000 members overwhelmingly backed shutting down the city’s 122 schools, leading to a four-day educators strike, the city’s first in 47 years. While the union successfully wrangled the district to provide fully paid dependent healthcare for educators, Curiel will now have to navigate the aftermath of that win. This year the district is pinning layoffs and school closures to the top of its syllabus — with Curiel fighting against them at every step.
Olga Miranda
President of SEIU Local 87, secretary-treasurer of the SF Labor Council. Represents: 4,500 private-sector janitorial workers. Salary: $140,666.
How we reported union leaders’ salaries:
Salary information comes from the U.S. Department of Labor and the Internal Revenue Service. This data has limitations and may not fully reflect current compensation. Filing periods vary by organization, and some figures may reflect prior years depending on the most recent available report. Salaries are not available for every individual.
Union leaders across San Francisco describe Miranda as a powerhouse. She’s “fucking great,” said one. She exercises power the old-fashioned way: members marching behind her, a bullhorn in hand, the volume turned up to 11. “Olga’s in your face,” one leader said. Because many of her union members are immigrants, Miranda frequently mobilizes against(opens in new tab) deportation threats; she pushed Lurie to be more vocal against the federal government early in his administration. And the mayor clearly values Miranda, featuring her in a September video(opens in new tab) alongside the Mexican consul general. The mayor’s allies tapped Miranda to serve on the Downtown Development Corp., raising money for civic efforts alongside bigwigs like crypto billionaire Chris Larsen and former eBay and Hewlett-Packard CEO Meg Whitman. Of course, revitalizing downtown will help Miranda’s members, who work at Salesforce, Marriott’s St. Regis, Lyft, Oracle Park, and other significant locations. She also serves as secretary-treasurer of the Labor Council, strategizing for public- and private-sector unions’ fights with city leaders. Miranda said her chief goal this year is educating immigrant workers on their citizenship rights, something Local 87 can’t take on alone. “It’s got to be the entire labor movement who has to answer that call,” she said.
Tony Delorio
Principal officer of Teamsters Local 665, member of SF Labor Council Executive Committee. Represents: 6,000 delivery drivers, truckers, parking attendants, and others. Salary: $192,554.
A third-generation San Franciscan and Teamster, Delorio could recognize the union’s logo — two horses and a wheel — by the time he was 2. He oversaw the parking garage at 5th and Mission before joining the union’s senior ranks and becoming its leader in 2019. One union figure described him as a “product of old-school San Francisco”; another called him “super loyal” and “unfiltered(opens in new tab).” Delorio has ties to Assemblymember Catherine Stefani (“They’re like Italian cousins,” one person said), Assemblymember Matt Haney, and District Attorney Brooke Jenkins. The Teamsters are at the forefront of the labor battle against artificial intelligence; particularly, autonomous vehicles that could affect delivery drivers. “Their end game, make no mistake, is parcel delivery,” said Delorio. His outfit has also been battling drone-delivery testing(opens in new tab) in the Mission, and Delorio is one of the lead advocates for Lurie’s Muni tax measure, serving as co-chair of the initiative.
Theresa Rutherford
President of SEIU Local 1021. Represents: 60,000 nurses, administrative and staff, nonprofit staffers, and others across Northern California. Salary: $100,522.
Rutherford moved to the U.S. from Jamaica in the late ’90s and worked as a nurse assistant at Laguna Honda Hospital. She became interested in labor issues after seeing the mental and physical abuse endured by healthcare workers. She has climbed the ranks of SEIU and was appointed president in 2022 and elected by membership in 2024. The union plunked more than $1.5 million into the 2024 election, supporting an additional tax on autonomous vehicles, the reelection of Supervisor Connie Chan, and opposing Mark Farrell’s mayoral campaign. While Canham, the union’s executive director, oversees 1021’s field directors, Rutherford connects with other labor groups and works on overall strategy. She is having a busy year: Her union will be campaigning for the Overpaid CEO Tax while trying to fend off layoffs and other budget cuts. “We’re not just throwing our hands up in the air,” Rutherford said of the city’s budget deficit. “We’re putting our money where our mouth is.”
Rudy Gonzalez
Secretary-treasurer of the San Francisco Building & Construction Trades Council, member of the SF Labor Council’s Executive Committee. Represents: 35,000 iron workers, electricians, plumbers, and others. Salary: $168,645.
A longtime labor organizer with roots in the Teamsters, Gonzalez is known for getting developers to use union work for the city’s construction projects. As a member of the Labor Council’s Executive Committee, Gonzalez is generally at the head of the table alongside other key union figures. “He basically knows what makes people tick,” one fellow labor leader said. “Why they’re doing what they’re doing. Are they politicians? Do they like to smoke cigars? Do they really want to help people?” In February, Gonzalez resigned(opens in new tab) from the Labor Council’s Public Employee Committee, exposing a fissure between his trades and the city’s public-sector unions, which are likely to put up a fight over layoffs. Meanwhile, Gonzalez needs to stay in City Hall’s good graces if he is to get work for his members, who have been affected by the dearth of development.
Larry Mazzola Jr.
Business manager and financial secretary treasurer of Local 38, president of the Building & Construction Trades Council. Represents: 2,600 plumbers, steamfitters, and HVAC/R workers. Salary: $326,199.
Known for his colorful quotes (“I wouldn’t know that dude if he fell face-first in my soup,” he once said of future Mayor Daniel Lurie) and propensity to wear sunglasses indoors, Mazzola hails from a dynastic line of labor organizers. His grandfather and father led Local 38 for decades before he took the reins in 2013. A product of area Catholic schools, Mazzola has capitalized on his deep civic roots by serving on city boards, including the influential Parks Commission. He has traditionally sided with the city’s moderate factions, including developers he can push to secure union construction jobs. But the council does have some progressive tendencies, endorsing Supervisor Connie Chan for Congress last month over state Sen. Scott Wiener, with whom it has quarreled over worker protections.
Kim Tavaglione
Executive director of the San Francisco Labor Council. Represents: 150 unions with a total of 100,000 members. Salary: $148,686.
Tavaglione built her bona fides as a rep for SEIU and a political director for the National Union of Healthcare Workers. At the Labor Council, she holds one of the most critical (and grueling) roles, overseeing the city’s many unions — which don’t always get along. That means steering the priorities and personalities of the labor bloc while also granting authorization if a union wants to strike. Tavaglione is considered by her peers to be a brawler more than a strategist. “Kim is someone you would want to be your field general for war, but she’s not someone who would cut a deal,” said a fellow labor executive. Tavaglione is gearing up for multiple fights, including Lurie’s charter reform ballot measure, which she said is driven by business interests.
They meet their government counterparts with a variety of jabs, kicks, and chokeholds. They’re the specialists focusing on their own fiefdoms, sometimes well beyond the octagon of San Francisco.
Jay Bradshaw
Executive secretary-treasurer of the North Coast States Carpenters Union. Represents: 57,000 carpenters, drywallers, pile drivers, and others along the West Coast. Salary: $350,869.
A state-level figure with deep contacts in San Francisco’s business community, Bradshaw and his carpenters have famously been at odds with Mazzola’s trades over issues like modular housing. The split came to a boiling point in 2021, when members of the trades criticized the modular construction of 833 Bryant St., a housing complex for formerly homeless people, overseen by Lurie’s nonprofit Tipping Point Community. “Some trades guy doesn’t like me? Cool, whatever,” Bradshaw said when asked about the dustup. Bradshaw is described in colorful ways by those with whom he has worked: “shit disturber,” “behind-the-scenes operator,” and “not someone to be dismissed or underestimated.” His union is expected to engage in a number of battles this year, including supporting supervisor campaigns for Stephen Sherrill and Alan Wong, and state Sen. Scott Wiener’s congressional race.
Hunter Stern
Assistant business manager for International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 1245. Represents: 29,000 utility workers in California and Nevada. Salary: $298,417.
While he may not be engaged in day-to-day City Hall squabbles, Stern plays a critical role in fending off political attacks against Pacific Gas & Electric, one of the most powerful businesses in town. “He’s an operator, a deal maker, a fierce advocate for his members, and a fierce defender of PG&E,” one labor figure said. The utility came under heavy criticism in December after blackouts caused mayhem across the city. The fiasco, caused by a fire inside a PG&E substation, pushed Wiener to propose a bill that would make it easier for cities to break away from the utility. For Stern, that means war. “We will have a fight again,” he said of the state senator’s efforts. “He has repeatedly attacked the utility. He doesn’t know anything about electricity.”
Mary Bravewoman
President of AFT2121, City College of San Francisco’s educators union. Represents: 900 full- and part-time educators. Salary: $111,853 (teacher salary from City College).
Bravewoman takes union representation so personally that she only recently started eating grapes. Growing up in Santa Cruz, her family joined a grape boycott to support the United Farm Workers’ fight for fair wages. A City College math teacher,(opens in new tab) the AFT 2121 president successfully campaigned to replace the school’s board trustees who voted to lay off educators. More union-friendly trustees now sit on the board. Unlike some union leaders, Bravewoman still works her day job but is paid “release time” for her union work. She hasn’t always had electoral success: She allied AFT2121 with SEIU 1021 to float Proposition O(opens in new tab) in 2022 to fund student workforce development classes through a parcel tax; the ballot measure failed. “We worked really hard. It was an opportunity for SEIU 1021 and AFT to come together,” she said. But other influences, including the landlord lobby, spent a boatload of money that “we weren’t able to beat.” Her local will have its hands full in November, as the union vies to elect candidates to four seats on the college board and support legislative aide Natalie Gee in her race for supervisor(opens in new tab). “We’ve got folks out there who’ve been door-knocking,” she said. Gee is running against incumbent Supervisor Alan Wong, a former college board trustee. No love lost there.
Pete Wilson
President of Transit Workers Local 250-A. Represents: 2,500 Muni operators. Salary: $96,752 (operator salary from Muni).
Wilson, who grew up in Santa Rosa, proudly touts his Italian immigrant grandfather’s role as a cement finisher. When Wilson made it to the city for college, he fell in love with Muni trolley buses(opens in new tab). He has spent the last eight years serving the union as a supporting player, long valued as a key strategist behind multiple presidents. In December, he finally took the driver’s seat, just in time for the agency’s generation-defining $307 million budget gap, which threatens to see Muni lines slashed. Wilson will lead his members out of their buses and onto the street to push for a regional ballot measure and local parcel tax to save the agency. “This is one of the biggest challenges we’ve had,” he said. And with no federal help on the way, “San Francisco is going to have to take care of itself.”
Peter Finn
Principal officer and secretary-treasurer of Teamsters Local 856 and president of the Teamsters Joint Council 7. Represents: 100,000 members in Northern California, Central Valley, and northern Nevada. Salary: $147,535.
Finn is a big shot at his union at both the local and state levels. He does dip his toes into San Francisco matters; on March 2, he spoke(opens in new tab) at a City Hall rally about the chaos Waymos caused during the December blackouts. He has also worked on unionization efforts of local Amazon warehouses.
Kim Evon
Executive vice president of SEIU Local 2015. Represents: More than 400,000 nursing and home-care workers. Salary: $246,422.
Evon’s union in 2023 helped secure $25 hourly wages(opens in new tab) for city-contracted caregivers. While she works on many statewide issues, she is a leading advocate for the Overpaid CEO Tax. Said one union figure of Local 2015, “They have the ability to mobilize and bring resources to the table.”
Criss Romero
Executive director of the Municipal Executives Association. Represents: 1,600 managers at City Hall, SFMTA, and Superior Courts. Salary: Undisclosed.
Romero’s job includes fending off calls to “chop from the top(opens in new tab),” a term Supervisor Connie Chan used last year during the budget deficit to push for cuts to management positions. The resulting layoffs were small.
Organizing isn’t their chief role — they most often hype workers’ priorities with politicians, moving and shaking to ensure laborers are top of the ticket.
Anand Singh
Director, Unite Here! International. Represents: 300,000 hospitality workers. Salary: Undisclosed.
Singh led Unite Here! Local 2 for nearly a decade, a tenure that included a national triumph and a historic collapse. In December 2018, Local 2 members celebrated their contract victory(opens in new tab) during a national strike against Marriott. In 2020, however, the pandemic decimated tourism(opens in new tab), leaving thousands of hotel workers — the bulk of Local 2’s membership — without jobs. The local almost closed entirely. But members made it clear they needed Local 2 to guide them through layoffs and navigate their next steps, and even tapped their benefits to keep the union afloat. “It was such a moving moment to see hotel workers, service-sector workers, people who are struggling to make ends meet use what little resources they have to ensure their union would survive,” Singh said. That solidarity stays with him as he serves as a bridge for Local 2 with Unite Here! nationally and on the executive committee of the San Francisco Labor Council. His role now is more political, relying on his relationships with city officials to help Local 2 under City Hall’s dome.
Vince Courtney Jr.
Political captain, LiUNA! Local 261. Represents: Concrete layers, gardeners, and street sweepers in the public and private sectors. Salary: $215,959.
Courtney grew up seeing his father — who ran SEIU Local 400 in the city —work in the office that would eventually become Miranda’s. He confidently plants one weathered boot in the world of journeymen laborers and one patent-leather oxford in the world of electoral politics. Past mayors Gavin Newsom and the late Ed Lee appointed him to the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, where he served as president and could approve policies and projects that benefited workers. Since stepping down in 2019 while under ethics scrutiny(opens in new tab), he has committed more of his time to coordinating PACs to direct funding toward labor issues and electing labor-friendly politicians. He also serves on the Labor Council’s Executive Committee, wielding influence over strategies to defend workers citywide. One union leader described Courtney as a “hemorrhoid” in cross-union strategic meetings. His response: “I voice my opinion, oftentimes aggressively, because our guys are hungry.” The tension stems from different beliefs: Laborers often fall on the other side of unions that tend to be anti-development and anti-growth, Courtney said. Laborers count on construction for work, but non-laborer unions sometimes take stances against construction as part of progressive political maneuvering. Despite entering its political echelons, he sometimes finds himself opposing City Hall, such as when Local 261 sued the SFPUC for retaliation(opens in new tab) after union leadership blew the whistle on a citywide corruption scandal. His efforts aren’t limited to San Francisco: He rallied laborers for Proposition 50, Newsom’s redistricting measure, and said he’s working to ensure that Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s replacement in Congress is a staunch labor ally.
Joshua Arce
Senior program manager, strategic initiatives, Northern California District Council of Laborers. Represents: 30,000 laborers from Fresno to the Oregon border; 5,600 in San Francisco, San Mateo, and Marin. Salary: Undisclosed.
Arce doesn’t negotiate contracts, file labor grievances, or directly organize workers. Instead, he wades into politics, ensuring that elected officials pass legislation friendly to blue-collar workers and advocating for infrastructure projects. A former civil rights attorney, Arce wears many hats: He’s president of the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission; a leader with the Northern California District Council of Laborers; a member of Local 261, which represents gardeners and concrete washers; and sits on the San Francisco Democratic Party board. His skills can cut both ways: Some in the labor movement characterize him as too cozy with politicians. One salty rival said, “People are like, ‘What’s his job?’ Nobody knows.” To that, Arce said, “I just work here.” It’s clear he has influence, however. In 2024, he joined with labor legend Dolores Huerta, a founder of the United Farm Workers Association, to campaign for Rep. Adam Gray, who unseated John Duarte(opens in new tab) in the Central Valley. Huerta came through for Arce and Local 261 when she joined them on the steps of City Hall in January to back legislation that would ensure higher pay for street cleaners. At a Democratic Party meeting in late February, Arce flexed his political muscles again, arguing that the party should endorse an earthquake safety bond that would bring “thousands of union construction jobs we need really, really bad right now.” The party’s delegates followed his lead, overwhelmingly.
John Doherty
Business manager of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 6, vice president for subcrafts at San Francisco Building Trades Council. Represents: 2,600 active workers. Salary: $286,041.
Doherty’s remit is vast: His union represents private- and public-sector employees, including power generation workers, traffic signal technicians, transit mechanics, and insider wiremen (what a layman would call a general electrician) across multiple agencies, such as the San Francisco Unified School District, City College, Public Works, and the SF Municipal Transportation Agency. Electricians, with highly technical expertise, are a “little harder to represent,” one union leader said. “They’ll second-guess you more. They’ll challenge you on the floor more.” Doherty navigates those tensions by being twice as prepared — and, as a colleague said, “wicked smart.” Representing electricians puts him on the front lines of climate policy debates. He chastises politicians who complain about the visual mess of Muni’s overhead wires. “Do you want to look at the air or do you want to breathe it?” he asks them. Doherty’s role as vice president for subcrafts at the San Francisco Building Trades Council puts him in rooms with City Hall power brokers, including this year’s Charter Reform Working Group. When Lurie’s allies suggested changing the city charter to require more signature gathering to place measures on the ballot, labor took issue right away. “That will basically quiet anybody who’s not a billionaire,” Doherty said. “It’ll silence you.” Whether he’s sitting with politicians or across from management, he always keeps in mind the physical risks his members take. “They work their tail off. We’re in construction. Shoulders go out, or knees go out, or wrists, or ankles. These folks, they use up their bodies,” he said. “It’s heartbreaking.”
The emerging movement leaders who are already punching well above their weight class.
Lizzy Tapia
President of Unite Here! Local 2. Represents: 15,000 hotel and restaurant workers across the Bay Area; 8,000-10,000 in San Francisco. Salary: $92,841.
When Tapia was 9, her parents, both nonprofit attorneys, took her to a picket line of Mexican farmworkers in their home of Watsonville. She still remembers the picketers’ slogan pushing to raise the price of produce for a fair wage: “Five cents for fairness.” The sea of people pushing for change inspired her. “I remember it, the feeling of it,” she said. Now, Tapia is in her second year as president of the hotel and restaurant workers union, picketing with her own sea of people: She led a successful 93-day hotel workers strike that rocked convention-goers and downtown denizens in late 2024. During the strike, she was detained by police(opens in new tab) for nonviolent civil disobedience that blocked downtown streets (and cable car tracks). It was one of the city’s largest strikes in a decade, prompting the intervention of Lurie, the mayor-elect, who called Marriott brass to nudge management. While new to leadership, Tapia has organized union actions for 18 years. Local 2 doesn’t have much money to spend on campaigns, Tapia said, but it’s “going in deep” to mobilize members to stump for(opens in new tab) Supervisor Connie Chan’s congressional race. Tapia respects that Chan supported minimum wage and healthcare for airport workers, a contract Local 2 is actively bargaining. Tapia and her members will soon suss out if they need to ignite strikes at Chase Center and Oracle Park, where they fear technology may begin to edge out workers. “We recognize that AI and technology is something that exists in our world,” she said. “It’s not about stopping it; it’s really about figuring out how does technology improve the lives of workers, and how do we maintain good standards and protect jobs for folks?”
Sam Gebler
Firefighter/paramedic, president of San Francisco Fire Fighters Local 798. Represents: 1,600 firefighters, paramedics, and EMTs at SFFD. Salary: Undisclosed.
Though he’s described by fellow union leaders as a humble, aw-shucks, Jimmy Stewart type, Gebler and his union put the “fight” in firefighters. While 798 isn’t known to raise vast sums to spend on elections, the firefighters’ endorsement is courted by politicians for its weight with voters. For politicians who spearhead their causes, like cancer care(opens in new tab), the firefighters will knock down walls. Gebler, who has worked since 2017 as a firefighter and paramedic, is facing early tests of his leadership, as he takes a front-and-center role in negotiations for higher wages, while working with the mayor and Board of Supervisors to pass an Earthquake Safety and Emergency Response Bond(opens in new tab) on the June ballot. The $535 million proposition would see $230 million go toward firefighting, expanding the city’s emergency water system on the west side, constructing a new fireboat manifold at Fort Mason, and renovating or replacing at least five seismically vulnerable fire stations. Union insiders say balancing the contract and the bond will be a difficult task.
Louis Wong
President of the San Francisco Police Officers Association. Represents: About 1,700 police officers. Salary: Undisclosed.
A veteran street cop, Wong last year became president of the police union, one of the city’s most vocal and influential labor organizations. The POA often acts like the department’s shadow leadership, equal parts political sledgehammer and SFPD bullhorn. The union didn’t endorse a mayoral candidate between 2020 and 2024, but it has regained political influence as public opinion has shifted back toward tough-on-crime policing. So far, Wong is a less cantankerous leader than his predecessors, focusing on bread-and-butter issues, like reducing the retirement age and increasing pay and benefits for officers. But he’s also been quietly acting as a liaison between the rank and file, City Hall, and the command staff. Whether he can deliver on his promises to members will be one of his largest tests as the union and city negotiate a new contract. It’s unclear if a raise is in the books given the giant budget deficit, even if city leaders are in a pro-cop mood.
Jim Araby
Strategic campaigns director at UFCW Local 5. Represents: 25,000 retail, cannabis, and agricultural workers. Salary: $130,189.
Araby led the United Food and Commercial Workers Western States Council for six years, pushing policies at the state level for California, Nevada, and Arizona. He now holds a top position in the largest private-sector union in Northern California, representing industries similar to those he supported in his previous job. Described as young, energetic, and rational, Araby is poised to become a bridge between the labor and business communities, according to one longtime labor figure. He was thrust into San Francisco politics after Lurie tapped him as a senior adviser on labor relations, filling a gap in an administration that does not have much union support.
Syd Simpson
Member of the California Nurses Association, executive committee member of the San Francisco Labor Council, steering committee of the California Working Families Party. Represents: Transgender civil rights. Salary: Undisclosed.
Simpson is making waves fighting for trans rights(opens in new tab). They helped organize the city’s Trans March(opens in new tab), bringing the first labor contingent to last year’s event. Sitting on the Labor Council’s Executive Committee and the steering committee of the California Working Families Party, Simpson played a leading role in organizing the debut congressional forum for successors to Rep. Nancy Pelosi and, as an executive board member of the Harvey Milk LGBTQ Democratic Club, started the group’s Trans Caucus. Simpson has their hands full organizing CNA, Rainbow Families Action, and the Labor Council to defend gender-affirming care from proposed federal rule changes(opens in new tab) at Kaiser, Sutter, University of California, and Stanford hospitals. “We haven’t heard from families that care has ended yet,” Simpson said. “We hope it holds.”
Zach Goldman
Political director of SEIU Local 1021. Represents: 60,000 nurses, administrative and staff, nonprofit staffers, and others across Northern California. Salary: $167,000.
Goldman is a member of the mayor’s charter reform group. He is known for developing relationships with City Hall, moving ballot measures, and representing the union in Sacramento.
Kristin Hardy
San Francisco vice president of SEIU Local 1021. Represents: 60,000 nurses, administrative and staff, nonprofit staffers, and others across Northern California. Salary: Undisclosed.
Hardy is one of SEIU’s five regional leaders. She’s usually one of the union’s front-line figures, holding the microphone during rallies, whether it’s protesting tech companies’ taxes, pushing for the city to hire more security guards at the library, or organizing for the Overpaid CEO Tax.
They’re the fixers behind the fighters — coaches and strategists who help union clients advance their priorities through City Hall by lobbying elected officials and staff.
Ramneek Saini
Lobbyist. Represents: Labor and corporate clients. Salary: Undisclosed.
Miranda of SEIU Local 87 and Jim Araby of UFCW Local 5 are arguably the closest union heads to Lurie’s administration. And their political right hand is Saini, a lobbyist(opens in new tab) who describes Araby as her mentor. Saini began her career supporting the San Francisco Labor Council, giving her the knowledge to float between the worlds of politics and unions. “My job, even with our corporate clients, is really providing them a pathway to labor. And really being that bridge,” she said. Saini is ubiquitous, attending any event where you’d expect to see(opens in new tab) City Hall elite, keeping an ear to the ground for the unions she represents. While Miranda’s members at Local 87 have the ultimate say on endorsements, Saini provides recommendations. Another mayoral connection — Han Zou, Lurie’s head of communications — used to work for Saini but departed to work on Lurie’s campaign, then stayed on in the administration. “I’m really sad. I thought Han was gonna come back after the mayor’s election,” Saini said. But Lurie made the right choice, she added. “Han’s brilliant.” And now Saini has another ally on the inside.
Chris Gruwell
Lobbyist, member of LiUNA! Local 261. Represents: Unions, corporations, local universities, and others. Salary: Undisclosed.
As CEO of the influential public affairs firm New Deal Advisers, Gruwell is an advocate for more than 50 clients. Lobbyist filings show him in constant touch with City Hall supervisors, department heads, and the mayor’s staff. Much of Gruwell’s work involves the firefighters union, Local 798, and Teamsters Joint Council 7, a regional body that reps workers in Northern California, the Central Valley, and northern Nevada. He has put the spotlight on increased cancer risks to firefighters and assists the Teamsters in strategies on pushing back against autonomous vehicles. The union has been able to block Waymo from making deliveries, and last year, it was front and center(opens in new tab) when a Waymo killed a beloved bodega cat.
Tom O’Connor
Former firefighter and past president of the Firefighters Local 798. Represents: Labor clients include Firefighters Local 798. Salary: Undisclosed.
Mark Gleason
Former secretary-treasurer of Teamsters Local 665. Represents: Labor clients include the Teamsters union. Salary: Undisclosed.
O’Connor and Gleason are former union heads who leverage their expertise to sway policy alongside Gruwell at New Deal Advisers. Gleason was a leader at Teamsters Local 665 when it first organized bus drivers(opens in new tab)working for Apple, Genentech, and other tech companies. Those drivers now enjoy robust benefits. “We’re very proud of that,” Gleason said. “It was the beginning of any organizing in the tech industry at all.” O’Connor, meanwhile, has racked up contractual wins for city firefighters. While their firm also represents real estate developers like Boston Properties, O’Connor and Gleason consistently put points on the board for labor. In January, O’Connor lobbied SFFD Chief Dean Crispen to ban harmful PFAS and other chemicals in protective gear on behalf of Local 798. Those “forever chemicals” lead to higher cancer rates, O’Connor said, and banning them makes firefighters safer(opens in new tab). “As a cancer survivor myself, I know that’s more than critically important.” O’Connor worked with Supervisor Matt Dorsey on behalf of the SF Deputy Sheriffs’ Association to support a payroll deduction that would fund donations for families of deputies killed on the job. And, on behalf of the Teamsters, Gleason lobbied airport officials to ensure that autonomous vehicles are held to similar regulations as Lyft and Uber.
Their peaks have passed, but these longtime organizers still have the ears of union leadership and command respect amongst the rank-and-file.
Susan Solomon
Former president of the United Educators of San Francisco, City College of San Francisco Board of Trustees member. Represents: 6,000 teachers, school counselors, campus security guards, and other school workers. Salary: $94,536 (as of 2020, paid by SFUSD before retirement).
When Solomon was growing up in San Francisco, her parents would sing “Solidarity Forever(opens in new tab),” the century-old labor song popularized by Pete Seeger. The message stuck. Two years after beginning work as a kindergarten teacher at John Swett Elementary School in 1999, Solomon became active with the UESF and was elected as executive vice president in 2012. She helped elect Board of Education candidates who championed union causes, pushed for a “restorative justice” approach to school discipline, and organized special-education teachers. “If we ran this show ourselves and we didn’t have to worry about money, what would we do?” she asked teachers. They distilled their answers into a document, “Solutions for Special Education(opens in new tab),” with short-term recommendations, including new lighting for sensitive students, that were implemented quickly. Long-term challenges, like addressing staffing shortages, remained a central plank even in UESF’s February strike. For many San Franciscans, however, Solomon is probably most closely associated with the bitter battle to bring kids back to school as the pandemic eased. Groups like Decreasing the Distance pushed for schools to reopen sooner, often clashing with Solomon and the union. “A distraught parent during a Board of Education meeting referred to me as ‘the most dangerous person in San Francisco,’” Solomon said, “and I was quite taken aback.” Still, she added, it was “necessary for schools to be safe.” The schools eventually reopened, and Solomon retired from the union in 2021. She now serves as a City College board trustee and is a grandmother of three — still singing Seeger songs.
Josie Mooney
Deputy director of SEIU Local 1021. Represents: 60,000 nurses, administrative and nonprofit staffers, and others across Northern California. Salary: Undisclosed.
Mooney previously ran SEIU 790, the public-sector employee union, before it merged with her current union and is now involved in external organizing, political research, and communications. “She’s kind of a whisperer behind the scenes,” said one SEIU organizer. She used to regularly get breakfast across from City Hall with Willie Brown when he was mayor, and the two still occasionally meet — most recently in February at the St. Regis, where Mooney was discussing gig work.
Sal Rosselli
President emeritus of the National Union of Healthcare Workers. Represents: 19,000 healthcare workers. Salary: $161,994.
Rosselli was a political fighter for decades, involved in the city’s two most prominent gay groups. He helmed the Alice B. Toklas LGBTQ Democratic Club in the 1980s and has been a member of the Harvey Milk LGBTQ Democratic Club since the 1990s. Out and proud during the height of the AIDS epidemic, Rosselli trailblazed for the gay movement in union leadership. “During the early days of the HIV-AIDS crisis, ignorance was our biggest enemy. We led the way on member education to ensure everyone understood the facts about the virus and felt safe treating their patients who were suffering from it,” he said. He was also at the epicenter of an internal power struggle at SEIU that was so contentious it has been referred to as(opens in new tab) labor’s “World War III.” Eventually, Rosselli founded NUHW, which has more than 19,000 members(opens in new tab). Though he retired as president in 2024, he’s still on the union’s payroll, leveraging his relationships to give NUHW members inroads to politicians. He also stumps for San Francisco, serving as a Democratic National Committee delegate(opens in new tab) during the 2024 presidential race. NUHW’s members voted to back state Sen. Scott Wiener’s campaign for Congress and Gary McCoy and Natalie Gee to the Board of Supervisors.
They don’t wear stripes or blow a whistle, but these are the figures whom both sides — local government and unions — trust to mediate their thorniest disputes.
Patrick Mulligan
Director of the Office of Labor Standards Enforcement. Represents: All San Francisco workers. Salary: $251,706.
Mulligan, a former financial secretary for the Carpenters Local 22, plays one of the key roles in city government directly involved with labor, since his 2016 appointment by the late Mayor Ed Lee(opens in new tab). The OLSE enforces city labor laws, making Mulligan the de facto sheriff(opens in new tab) of the workforce. OLSE can proactively audit employers but also depends on labor and community partners, like the Chinese Progressive Association, since enforcement is largely driven by complaints made to hotlines and the office’s website. In the 2024-25 fiscal year, the office collected $21 million for roughly 17,000 workers(opens in new tab) who were deprived of wages or healthcare benefits or otherwise swindled by management. Some labor leaders wish Mulligan were more of a champion to their causes, describing him as “coloring inside the lines” and a stickler for precision; he has tossed back more than a few complaints that were filed in a sloppy manner. Mulligan argues that running a tight ship ensures a complaint can make it all the way to court and a resolution that serves the city — and, more important, workers.
Lou Giraudo
Business executive. Represents: The bridge between labor and business. Salary: Undisclosed.
Giraudo is considered a rare breed as someone with a long history of business success who maintains deep ties to the labor movement. Considered a “big-time power broker” by one well-known labor figure, Giraudo has roots in San Francisco that run deep. His father, “Papa Steve,” bought Boudin Bakery in 1941, and Giraudo oversaw it before his son Dan bought it in 2021. Giraudo is known for his mediation skills, having hammered out a deal in 2005(opens in new tab) that ended a nine-week strike between SEIU and California Pacific Medical Center, for which he received praise from Rep. Nancy Pelosi. Giraudo is working on a revitalization project for Fisherman’s Wharf, with the building trades’ agreement to complete it with union labor. “He’s of the shrinking breed of pro-labor capitalists,” said a labor representative. “He knows how to make money, but he doesn’t see unions as being in opposition.”
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Gabe Greschler
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Their names and faces are unknown to many San Franciscans, but they craft law, elect politicians, and run city-shattering strikes. Here’s The…
sfstandard.comTeachers Rally In Sacramento
https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=1391206153047961&set=pcb.1391206269714616
Stop The Union Busting & Unfair Labor Practices! UAW4811 UCSF Mission Bay Workers Rally For Contract
https://youtu.be/6ZbKXC4K6_A
UC UAW Local 4811 members are facing a union busting drive by the UC bosses and managers. UCSF workers at Mission Bay on March 12, 2026 rallied and reported …that their labor rights are being retaliated against by management and need living wages. They are being charged extra fees which means wage cuts. Also workers announced that over 2,000 new workers have voted to join UAW 4811 bringing its membership to 40,000.UC workers also face massive budget cuts on their research projects and Trump’s attacks on medical research. They also announced that if no progress in negotiations they would launch unfair labor practice strikes throughout the system.
AFSCME 3299 has been without a contract for two years and Teamsters Local 2010 is also negotiating for a contract.
Additional Media:
Stop Union Busting! UAW UC Workers Protest UC Bosses & Felony Arrests For Chalking At UCSD
https://youtu.be/K7E6B9ez5-E
UC UAW Workers & Unite Here11 Workers Protest Union Busting By UC Bosses At UC Regents Meeting In SF
https://youtu.be/h3jIVt1rqKY
Chilean Unionist Filipe Tomayo Flores Speaks At UC Regents Meeting Opposing Union Busting By UC Bosses
https://youtu.be/5l9gZF337nQ
UC UAW Workers & Unite Here11 Workers Protest Union Busting By UC Bosses At UC Regents Meeting In SF
https://youtu.be/h3jIVt1rqKY
Chilean Unionist Filipe Tomayo Flores Speaks At UC Regents Meeting Opposing Union Busting By UC Bosses
https://youtu.be/5l9gZF337nQ
UAW UC Workers Statewide Strike For A Living Wage & Housing
https://youtu.be/vKI80Pg3ASc
UC assets grow by $38 billion in 2021 to $168 billion, with endowment returning 33.7 percent and pension up 30.5 percent
https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/press-room/uc-assets-grow-38-billion-2021-168-billion-endowment-returning-337-percent-and-pension
UAW 2865 UCB Grad Students March To Sproul Hall To Demand COLA & Against Union Busting At UCSC
https://youtu.be/9QspYy1sY1I
UCSC Graduate Students Wildcatting For Survival
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3FoEkSBrFUk
Justice For UCSC Graduate Students-UCSC Wildcat Striker Natalie Ng Speaks Out To UC Management
https://youtu.be/P4RvjIj3IUo
UCSF Professors Support Striking Graduate Students
http://ucscfa.org/2019/12/scfa-solidarity-with-graduate-students/
Graduate Student Strikes Are Spreading in California
https://www.vice.com/en_ca/article/wxe45b/graduate-student-strikes-are-spreading-in-california
UAW 2865 Statement On 54 Terminated Santa Cruz Workers
http://uaw2865.org/uaw-2865-statement-on-54-terminated-santa-cruz-workers/f
UAW 2865 Gradute Union Files Unfair Labor Practice Charge Against University
http://uaw2865.org/uc-student-worker-union-files-unfair-labor-practice-charge-against-the-university/
Across UC System, Graduate Students Unite for COLA Movement
http://dailynexus.com/2020-02-13/across-uc-system-graduate-students-unite-for-cola-movement/
PAY US MORE UCB! Graduate Student Workers at UC Santa Cruz, UC Davis and UC Santa Barbara Are All On Strike, Why Aren't We?
https://www.payusmoreucb.com
Janet Must Go! UC Workers Want UC Pres Napalitano Out
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htslfoHPWvY
Production Of Labor Video Project
www.labormedia.net
"If AI is writing the work and AI is reading the work, do we even need to be there at all?" Education workers reveal a growing crisis on campus and off
https://substack.com/app?utm_campaign=email-read-in-app&utm_source=email
AI Killed My Job: Educators.
MAR 13
…
Few spheres of public life have been more rapidly and thoroughly transformed by generative AI products than education, and few professions have been more dramatically upended than teachers and education workers. There’s a case to be made that the first major social transformation of the modern AI era was the mass diffusion of ChatGPT into classrooms, where students took to using it as an easy implement for cheating on homework.
This mass plagiarization crisis has only deepened and complicated since, leaving educators, administrators, and students to grapple with how to construct, enact, and enforce AI policies at school. I should know: My partner is a professor at a university, and dealing with students who use AI to cheat on assignments has become a core part of her job, and an endless source of frustration.
But cheating on coursework is only the tip of the iceberg. Universities have signed huge contracts with AI companies, which have been driving hard into the space, while K-12 public schools have adopted AI tools, sometimes disastrously. (Los Angeles Unified School District superintendent Alberto Carvalho’s home was raided as part of an FBI investigation into a multimillion dollar deal with an educational chatbot developer that failed within months). Such deals, like the California Statue University system’s $17 million partnership with OpenAI, or Ohio State’s policy to mandate all students learn AI fluency, are top-down initiatives that have left many educators working in the classroom backfooted. Teachers and students alike are being encouraged from all angles to adopt AI products, setting up new arenas for tension and conflict, and posing serious questions about the future of instruction.
Art by Koren Shadmi. "AI KILLED MY JOB" with Killed in red text and an image robot at a desk with a "i heart by job" mug.jpeg
Art by Koren Shadmi
AI has indeed flooded the profession, impacting tutelage, administrative work, counseling, testing, and beyond. And it’s already had serious ramifications for labor; as in many other trades, education jobs are being deskilled, degraded, and even lost outright to clients and bosses embracing AI systems. Librarians and tutors are watching as administrators and edtech companies embrace AI tools as a means of cutting their work hours. IT and HR professionals in the education space are competing with AI products on the market and speeding up work to match their output. Educators of every stripe worry that quality instruction and critical thinking skills are taking serious hits as AI provides an easy, if frequently incorrect, route to an answer. And ominously, critical AI programs are being cut just as universities turn to embrace chatbots. One instructor at the University of California at Irvine, Ricky Crano, wrote in to share his story of being laid off from a job organizing a series of seminars that examined the tech industry—just around the time the school was promoting its proprietary chatbot, ZotGPT.
Some educators are fighting back: The American Association of University Professors, a union representing academic workers, for instance, has called for faculty control over all AI decisions as a matter of policy, and AI has become a battleground in contract negotiations and campus life. Graduate student unions, librarians, and activists are organizing against administrations that have rushed to deploy AI.
I’ve heard stories like these, and many more. Last year, 404 Media ran a great roundup of stories told by teachers, and how they’re struggling with AI in the classroom. So with this, the fifth installment of AI Killed My Job,we’ll hear not just from teachers, lecturers, and instructors, but from education workers across the field—private tutors, student athlete coaches, librarians, HR employees, essay graders, and edtech workers—who have all had their jobs transformed by AI. These stories, some of which may sound familiar a few years into the AI boom, and many which will not, help paint a fuller picture of just how the technology has already impacted some of our most crucial institutions.
If your job has been impacted by AI, and you would like to share your story as part of this project, please do so at AIkilledmyjob@pm.me. The next installments will aim to cover healthcare, journalism, and retail and service jobs.
Upgrade to paid
Before we proceed, I want to share word of a project that might be of interest to readers. The Fund for Guaranteed Income is a nonprofit that researches and enacts, you guessed it, guaranteed income projects, and they’re working on “a support program for workers whose jobs or income have been affected by AI, designed with direct input from impacted workers,” FGI head Nick Salazar tells me. He asked if I might extend a call for participants with readers, and I’m happy to do so:
If AI has changed your work, you can share your story anonymously at aicommonsproject.org. Submissions directly shape what the program will look like, and anyone who shares will be first to know when it launches.
And now, AI Killed My Job: Educators.
This story was edited by Joanne McNeil.
I don’t have any reason to believe my employer will not replace me totally with AI
Tutor at a community college
I work at a community college as a tutor to students in ESL, English, and—more broadly—writing for other courses like major midyear essays for students in other classes or those working toward high school equivalency tests. My hours were halved after Trump DOE cuts, so like many other workers I was already in a precarious position.
It’s a fairly low-pay job that takes a lot of emotional labor, especially considering many of our students have not only been failed by the education system but are often literally hungry, might not have heat or AC, are refugees from war-torn countries, and/or are facing a constellation of other life challenges that make it very difficult to succeed. Many of my students survive on gig work and/or Amazon warehouse jobs. It didn’t surprise me when some of these first-year English students started using AI for their papers.
One particularly memorable student brought in her paper followed by the AI version written out paragraph to paragraph in her notebook. She wanted me to help her merge them. ChatGPT made a reference to a movie anecdote that doesn’t exist. This was a personal essay. This was early on—when the AI was so shitty, I sort of believed I could convince her of the value of her own story and voice—which I attempted to do for an hour. We really bonded, it felt like a win for the day, and then she had to go work at Amazon.
A few weeks later, she brought in an AI outline that made no sense and she could not explain which made brainstorming for her paper impossible. Her professor had given her an A [on the outline]. Shortly after, she brought in an AI-written paper that also made no sense and pulled from real sources, but ones that were not reputable and with references to quotes that did not exist. Other students had also begun to bring in oddly perfect personal essays.
The focus was frequently how to personalize them, to try to inject a tiny bit of who they are into the bland product AI had spat out. Sometimes I just couldn’t tell whether it was their own work or not.
I cannot express enough how important the human connection is at my job: these are people who rarely get the support they need and deserve.
That’s really at the core of the issue for me: This was one of my favorite jobs because I felt like I was doing a good thing, I saw students make wildly awesome improvements as writers over the months, and we built real relationships. I cannot express enough how important the human connection is at my job: these are people who rarely get the support they need and deserve. I’ve had students break down crying, I’ve talked one off the ledge. I spent a year decoding the insanity that is a green card application for another. One of the biggest barriers to success where I work is just signing in—basic tech literacy. If/when we switch to AI tutors, the lack of accessibility is one of many issues that is invisible to people who don’t do our job every day.
In the past when my students left, I had faith that they could succeed, that they’d really learned something—namely how to think critically and value their own story. We were able to work together because there was a basic foundation of trust. That trust is gone now, replaced by suspicion and frustration. It feels like my new job is how to help students cheat better.
At our latest professional development training, we were told that the college was piloting Khanmigo, an AI “learning assistant” (lol) for math. We were told to write down all of our fears about AI or in the chat and then push them aside. We listed out the fear of job loss the most, followed by loss of critical thinking skills, privacy issues, feeding a machine that steals our ideas and churns out mediocrity…Many tutors went out of their way to include links to sources like MIT. They also pointed out that AI had yet to improve productivity or make a profit. Our supervisors literally did not address any of this. The message was clear: *AI is here to stay and we have to adapt.*
We were told not to question whether students are using AI, to in fact assume they are, and tutor them on how to better use it. The “use cases” my supervisor included had students choosing between different AI rewrites of passages for whichever one is better and why. We’re supposed to encourage them to think critically about what AI spurts out. We’re also supposed to pretend that this type of tutoring makes any sense when students can just ask for suggestions, click apply all, and get on with it—or, as we know many do—just drop the assignment prompt into AI, mix it up in a few different models, and then ask it to dumb itself down a bit to sound more like them.
I don’t have any reason to believe my employer will not replace me totally with AI even though my supervisor insists they won’t. I know a machine can technically do my job and that AI is already making my job obsolete considering students don’t have to write anymore. My college has chosen to hire numerous adjuncts part-time, limiting how many full-timers they have, and I am one of them. I ultimately ended up taking fewer hours than they offered and contacting some old freelance writing clients to spend more time away from there. It feels like rejecting them before they reject me. My supervisor is giving us the “option” to lead AI workshops and said to think about it. I know the right answer is to say yes. I won’t.
—Lauren Krouse
[We followed up with Krouse before publication. She told us she had quit.]
We’re expected to accept work that is clearly not the student’s as if it were
Professor
I’m a professor in the California State University system, which was recently profiled due to its stated desire to be the “largest AI-driven university in the world.” I want to talk about academic misconduct.
Academic misconduct is when students pass off work that they haven’t done as their own. It used to be “when students pass off other people’s work as their own,” but now, students simply plug exam questions into a chatbot and copy and paste what it spits back to them. While academic misconduct has always been a problem on campuses, before AI, marshaling your evidence and presenting it to the student would trigger a confession, which could then become an opportunity to teach.
Now, one of two things happens: either the student confesses but doesn’t change their behavior, or they double down and insist that it’s their work despite the evidence you present. Students are convinced that the AI cannot be detected, and they refuse to listen when you show them the tells, insisting that it was their own work. I had a student make reference to three issues that were extremely relevant to the exam question but so far outside the realm of what we studied that the only way they would know to talk about it is through extensive self-study that would be reflected in their post-exam recollection. When the student had no idea what their own exam was talking about, but they insisted that they had written the exam answer, I was left relatively nonplussed.
I’m new to the CSU, so I haven’t had occasion yet to send a student over to the formal investigatory process. But in general, my experience at other institutions suggests that without a confession, administrators are loathe to impose any penalties for academic misconduct – and the mere fact of referral means that the student will be on guard against less formal sanctions (and in fairness, it would not be inappropriate to call those “retaliation,” so arguably the student is correct). But this means that when a student refuses to take responsibility for their work, that there’s usually simply no consequences whatsoever – and we’re expected to accept work that is clearly not the student’s as if it were.
There’s also the problem of mixed messages. While we as faculty are free to ban the use of AI from our classes, the university system is sending multiple messages that these are good and useful tools for students. Students are given a subscription to a bespoke ChatGPT bot for the university, and there are constantly workshops and continuing education sessions about “how to use AI for [this thing we have to do].” Combining the administration’s aggressively pro-AI stance with the easy availability of tools means that faculty protests usually fall on deaf ears – even after we show students the complete and utter uselessness of the tools for the purposes they want.
And our students are, frankly, primed to be the targets of AI flimflam. The CSU isn’t an open-admissions university but it is an access institution. This means that we admit students who are at-risk of failing out of higher ed, either because of lack of preparation, lack of resources, or lack of bandwidth due to work or care obligations. This means that a lot of our students struggle with the basic kinds of tasks that we assign them. The promise of an automatic task completer is deeply attractive, and the background and training of our students doesn’t really equip most of them to adequately assess the claims of the AI pitch.
A lot of our students struggle with the basic kinds of tasks that we assign them. The promise of an automatic task completer is deeply attractive, and the background and training of our students doesn’t really equip most of them to adequately assess the claims of the AI pitch.
I haven’t been fired and replaced by AI; we have a strong and militant union that is aggressively pushing back against the use of AI to replace faculty. But bargaining is concessions, and it’s not clear whether the administration will be willing to give ground on this issue given how strongly they’ve staked the institution’s future on it. The job has changed due to AI, and combined with all of the other assaults on American higher education, I don’t know if my career will remain on its current track long enough for me to get tenure.
—Anonymous
https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fee9d5367-4f33-4bcb-8040-6e25e35a6b57_205x205.webp
My university used to WorkDay’s AI to streamline me out of job
Adjunct professor and HR worker at a university
I worked in HR for a university, handling the paperwork for our adjunct professors. Contract hires. And I was an “HR Partner” in addition to my role as an office coordinator.
Anyway, I’m an adjunct myself. Or I was. I taught writing, one quarter per year. A one-credit class. Amounts to about $700. Before taxes.
I took a job at my alma mater, and when it faced financial turbulence, the university responded by laying off 40% of the full-time faculty. They told me I’d be extra busy now, what with all the new adjuncts coming in (cheap labor).
And I was.
The day that HR called me into the Dean’s office to lay me off, I asked them a simple question:
“Who is going to work with all of the adjuncts—the people I handle paperwork and onboarding for every quarter? The people I talk to every day, helping them sort out their classes, keys, syllabi, schedules, and miscellaneous concerns?”
“Oh-oh-oh, WorkDay will do that!” the HR rep told me with a smile. WorkDay is an AI platform for streamlining work. It certainly streamlined mine.
—Jason M. Thornberry
Refusing to use Copilot cost me my job
IT professional at a university
For the past 2 years I’d been working as an IT Professional II at TAMU AgriLife, an organization under Texas A&M University that conducts research and programs related to agriculture and life science. In November 2024, I was moved from the department I’d been working as an IT Professional at since March 2023 to a new department under a new manager. This new manager made it clear from the start that he was obsessed with generative AI, telling me that his department was the place to be if I wanted to learn how to use gen AI. I, however, have never been a fan of generative AI, and had been working my job well for 2 years without it. As soon as I arrive in this new department, this new manager tries to subtly push me into using ChatGPT, Copilot, and Grok to do my work of helping others with technology problems, but every time I was asked I politely declined.
Then, in late March 2025, I had an employee evaluation with this new manager. As soon as the evaluation begins he starts heavily trying to push me into using generative AI, saying it’s “the way of the future” and that “everyone who doesn’t use it will be left behind.” When I tell him I have no interest in using AI, he says that I “better start or I’ll have a hard time finding or keeping a job”. He then tells me he’s going to get me a Copilot license, and that I must take a training course to use Copilot. I tell him that even if I take a Copilot course, I won’t use it in my work and thus buying a Copilot license for me would be a waste of company money. The employee evaluation continues, and he keeps trying to pressure me into using AI, but I continue to decline.
Then, on the following Monday in early April, he sends me a message that he’s gotten me the Copilot license (despite me telling him not to) and tells me to pick a day to take Copilot training. I reiterate to him that I have no interest in using Copilot and try to continue doing my job, but he sends more messages to me in an attempt to try and make me take the Copilot lessons. That same day as I am working, one of my coworkers suddenly gets up from his desk and starts yelling excitedly to our manager about how he had just used generative AI to make a musical about “an impregnation ninja who fertilizes every woman on the planet.” My manager responds by laughing it off like it was nothing. As soon as I get the chance I have a private conversation with my manager to tell him that I have problems with my coworker using generative AI to make explicit musicals in the workplace, but this manager says that this coworker “has always been kind of a degenerate” and that “I’ve told him to stop, but the AI is a tool, so it’s up to him how to use it”…meaning this has happened before, and he’s done nothing about it.
The week continues until Friday, when after asking me again if I’ve signed up for the Copilot training and I reiterate that I haven’t, this manager sends me an email saying that if I don’t take the Copilot training I will either be disciplined or potentially terminated. At this point I’ve had enough, so I call Human Resources and the boss of our IT company and report everything I just told you to them, and that my manager is trying to force me to use generative AI but isn’t doing anything about another employee making explicit works during work hours. Unfortunately though, both the boss and HR try to split this into 2 separate issues; the boss says that he will talk to my manager about allowing a worker to get away with making explicit works at the office, but that this manager can make me use AI if he wants and if I don’t like it I should “choose between my morals or my job”; and HR says they will wait to take action until after the boss talks to my manager.
When I tell him I have no interest in using AI, he says that I “better start or I’ll have a hard time finding or keeping a job.
The following Monday, during the second week of April, the boss of our company does have a private meeting with my manager, but I was never informed what was said at that meeting. I assume that the boss told my manager to back off from trying to force me to use AI, because this manager doesn’t mention the Copilot training courses at all for the next several weeks. Thus, I return to working my job and try to move past this whole fiasco.
Things settle down for the next few weeks, until April 23, 2025. On that day, this manager waits until everyone except for me and him are out of the office, and then suddenly asks if I took the Copilot training (after having not mentioned it in the past few weeks). When I say no, he tells me that the time for the Copilot training in April has already passed, and that because I missed the training I will have to either resign in 60 days or be terminated. I ask about taking the Copilot courses in May that were also being offered, but he doesn’t accept and reiterates that I have to choose resignation or termination. I decided to resign.
—Caleb Polansky
My students genuinely do not understand why they shouldn’t use AI
University Lecturer
I’m a lecturer in Psychology at a large private college in Dublin. At a recent meeting (zoom—of course!) our Data Analytics and Reporting manager asked what we all thought about getting AI to mark our students’ work, the things that couldn’t already be turned into auto-marked online MCQs etc, like long form essays. I pointed out that we are paid to mark the work we assign (it’s actually my least favourite part of the job, but that’s not the point) and asked if we could expect a reduction in pay as a result. I was told “We aren’t going to talk about that.” I should train the AIs to replace me as a marker but should not even be so bold as to wonder what effect that will have on my pay.
Obviously, students are using AI to write the assignments anyway. The idea that we can catch this kind of plagiarism effectively is pure fantasy. Increasingly my students genuinely do not understand why they should not use AI anyway… what is the point of ‘wasting’ days researching and writing an essay when the AI version will be as good or even better?
My question now is if AI is writing the work and AI is reading the work, do we even need to be there at all?
This whole profession never really recovered from powerpoint, this is just the nail in the coffin.
—Anonymous
The majority of the students learn nothing
Private computer science tutor
When the pandemic hit in the Spring of 2020, it was a catastrophe for students suddenly forced into remote learning, as professors were blindsided and desperately improvising… Begrudging acceptance of online education was indisputably bad for learning, but it did create demand for online tutors, and that has been my job since Covid.
The majority of students are behind on an assignment, and just want answers that will get them a decent grade. As a good tutor, my job was to try to redirect that desire toward actual learning, not just do their work for them. Then came the large language models. I got to watch some lower-performing students use them, and it was deeply concerning. They would type (or copy-paste) a description of the code they wanted into a coding environment, then accept whatever completion emerged so long as it compiled. If it did not, they would try again, with no ability to understand or correct the generated code. No learning took place.
I have seen far fewer students, as the casual, lazy ones who just wanted a B-level answer can now often get one from a coding LLM.
This past year I have seen far fewer students, as the casual, lazy ones who just wanted a B-level answer can now often get one from a coding LLM, since homework problems are well-represented in the LLMs’ training sets. They don’t understand (or care) that the point of their assignments is not to create more solutions to homework problems, but to teach them fundamentals of programming and computer science, and there is no one there to gently correct them. The less mercenary students still look for tutoring, and they are more fun to work with, but they are a minority, and unfortunately there are not enough of them.
—Sean
My colleagues have abandoned their values to board the AI hype-train
Librarian at an R1 research university
It is pretty understood in my department that we are opposed to AI in the research process but as soon as we leave our office suite, we are met by many AI advocates. I actually signed up for this substack after I had a disagreement with a professor while I was in the middle of teaching a session for one of their classes and felt like I needed to learn more detailed information on the way AI works. I told students that ChatGPT is not a search engine, and while I was technically wrong in that it has web browsing capability, I was correct in that it is terrible. Unfortunately for me in that moment I have integrity and can say things like “I don’t know that for sure so I will cede that to you and look into it more.”
Pettiness aside:
I think the change is coming fast. Every day there are new conference presentations and papers on why librarians should be using AI and how they can do it. Academic librarians are guilty of always trying to “prove our worth” and get on board with every new trend regardless of whether or not we should. And in the case of AI we absolutely should not. It goes against the core values of the profession as stated by the American Library Association: “Access, Equity, Intellectual Freedom and Privacy, Public Good, and Sustainability.” It violates all of the tenets of the ACRL Frameworks for Information Literacy. It is shocking to me how fast some of my colleagues have abandoned their stated values to get on board the AI hype-train. I get a bitter taste in my mouth every time I think about the ones that were giving land acknowledgements (maybe still are) and now champion AI.
Academic librarians are guilty of always trying to “prove our worth” and get on board with every new trend regardless of whether or not we should. And in the case of AI we absolutely should not.
At my university AI is being pushed from the top down. Leadership has openly stated that workers who do not use AI will get left behind. If there is organized resistance on campus, I haven’t found it outside my department. I know that there are many in the profession who are opposed, however.
I am not sure if I can say specifically that it is changing the way that patrons are experiencing the library. I would not be surprised if it was, though. I do believe it is changing the way that patrons perform research and increasing the likelihood that they will be satisfied with “good enough” or even just “well, it’s something.” I have heard students defend the position that chatbots have access to 80% of the internet and are gaining more every day. I don’t know where this belief comes from other than well crafted propaganda?
But I do want my last point to be this: I don’t blame people, especially students, for using these tools when they don’t know better. We live in a hell world with increasingly limited time for ourselves. ChatGPT and LLMs like it claim to offer them some of that time back. The way that the bots “talk” to them is with a sense of sureness and like the bot is their friend. It doesn’t offer critique of what the user does, it doesn’t challenge them. And while those things might feel comforting, it is cheating them of real learning.
Teaching is a relational process. Student and teacher should both learn from one another and with that comes friction. LLMs will do anything possible to eliminate that relational friction to maintain the comfort of users. So, what’s more appealing? The librarian telling you no, or the chatbot giving you all the “answers?”
—Anonymous
AI training programs are failing student athletes
Assistant Strength and Conditioning coach at an NCAA Division-3 University
I currently work as a part-time, hourly wage, no benefits, assistant strength and conditioning (S&C) coach at an NCAA Division-3 university. My hiring as a part-time assistant already represents a reduction in staffing, at least partially due to AI use. I struggle to get even adequate part-time hours, which may result in the future elimination of the position or my inability to keep the position. This is largely due to direct and indirect effects from AI use.
We use a virtual training platform to deliver strength training programs to the university’s hundreds of student-athletes. This offers several ostensible positives. Ideally, we write training programs in the app that students can access on their smartphones, which includes short gif exercise demonstrations and allows them to enter training data. Streamlining training program delivery can allow us to spend more time coaching and interacting more meaningfully with athletes versus writing the program in Excel, emailing/printing it, and spending most of our contact time reminding athletes how to read it and what the exercises are. The app guidance can help students achieve the training on their own when away from our coaching for various unavoidable reasons.
The app also facilitates a lazier and labor-cutting approach with their range of semi-responsive AI training programs. Provide some demographic details, such as sport, primary competitive season, gender of athlete, beginner/advanced, and any specific equipment exclusions, and the AI will generate as mediocre of a training program as one would expect of such broad inputs and limited knowledge of the actual humans and environment. In the typical AI use case, this is better than literally nothing, and it can receive human intelligence tweaks to go from mediocre to adequate. There is no source info available as to how the AI designs the program, namely, what are the purported differences between sports, genders, beginner/advanced, etc. that they are using to program? A capable human coach would be responsible for answering these questions. I’ve made some comparisons between close options, say male/female or baseball/softball or women’s/men’s lacrosse and found either no differences or arbitrary changes that I would be unable to explain.
In reality, we do not use time saved by AI programming to spend more time coaching and interacting with athletes and colleagues. We do not actually see all athletes or teams. Several teams do not participate in S&C at all. These sports often have team accounts set up on the AI program, but don’t know about them or use them. Even if they did, the programs are so clearly inadequate that I can’t in good faith recommend that they use it without modification. Some athletes do S&C on their own individually, while some sport coaches handle it themselves without us. We’ve ceded this ground as a staff rather than use time saved from programming to develop relationships with coaches and athletes who don’t inherently engage with us. This especially includes athletes and teams who aren’t traditionally enthusiastic about S&C: more women’s teams, endurance or more “niche” sports, and sports with chronically poor win-loss records.
Even if following an app was a direct substitute for in-person participation with qualified staff, this reduces our role to “programmers” instead of teachers.
I build my own training programs in the app and use the app only as the delivery platform. This improves the quality of my training programs, because I’m writing them for the actual humans in front of me, in our actual shared environment, considering their actual sport and academic schedules, instead of the AI estimations of those key factors. I feel that my relationship with the athletes is better, as we’re talking about the training and I’m taking their feedback and we’re working with it together and we see each other’s collected invested efforts. I try to communicate with sports coaches on our shared teams, to mixed results. Some appreciate the collaboration and it has improved my work and deepened my relationship with the team. Others seem to wonder why I’m bothering them. A human-intelligence approach also increases my working hours so that I can actually get close to a full 20-hour week. I would have more like 5-10 hours of “floor time” (ie. in the gym with athletes) only if I followed the head coach’s example to only use prompt-and-tweak AI programming.
I have seen numerous instances of poor quality training due to our use of the AI programs. Here are a few significant examples:
The AI programs are automatically set up to change exercises every 4 weeks. One team changed exercises during the week of their conference championship semi-final game. Sore legs were had by all, as changing exercises is known to increase muscle soreness and the new exercises were more intense. They played the semi-final that weekend to a highly fatiguing overtime win and then lost in the final on the following weekend.
The AI calendar follows pre-established program pathways from one physical focus quality to the next (eg. muscle size, strength, power, etc.). This resulted in one team doing a maximum strength phase (heavy weights, slow speed, high fatigue) during the final weeks of their competitive season, unadjusted for their game schedule. Many athletes simply did not follow the program.
The AI only sets a single competitive season, so it’s immediately inappropriate to use for athletes who have two competitive seasons over a year. Some sports have a split season of both fall and spring competition, either equally weighted or with one slightly prioritized over the other. Athletes on at least one team did high-fatigue hypertrophy (muscle-gaining) training during their spring in-season phase of faster pace, lighter bodyweight, more readiness-dependent performance demands.
Athletes often no-show to sessions with the provided reason that they can do it on their own with the app. Coaches often cancel sessions for the same reason. Even if following an app was a direct substitute for in-person participation with qualified staff, this reduces our role to “programmers” instead of teachers. Of course, as a staff we aren’t even “programming” because the AI program is.
Cutting in-person time eliminates our ability to provide actual instruction of physical movement, develop relationships, and create a quality team training environment. We know that these factors are actually what improve training outcomes, creates a rewarding athlete experience, and benefits life beyond immediate sport performance, not toiling away in isolation guided by an app. Session cancellations, reduced attendance, and low communication also reduce my enjoyment of the job, working hours, and income.
—Anonymous
Stop The Union Busting & Unfair Labor Practices! UAW4811 UCSF Mission Bay Workers Rally For Contract
Chicago Teachers Union Members Vote to Join National Day of “No School, No Work, No Shopping” on May 1st
Chicago, IL. At the Chicago Teachers Union’s House of Delegates, the union’s highest elected governing body voted to echo the national call for…
www.ctulocal1.orgAlameda Health System layoffs deferred while county explores options
https://www.berkeleyside.org/2026/03/04/alameda-health-system-layoffs-deferred-county-supervisors
A plan to slash 188 health care jobs at the East Bay’s safety net hospital would heavily impact mental health programs. …County leaders hope to avoid this.
By Darwin BondGraham
March 4, 2026, 10:20 a.m.
Alameda County’s public hospital system, which includes the region’s main provider of mental health services and clinics serving thousands of low-income residents, has been spared layoffs — for now.
On Tuesday, the Alameda Health System and the county agreed to hold off on job cuts scheduled to take effect on March 9.
The plan would have included the closure of mental health programs at Highland Hospital and Fairmont Hospital, AHS’s ambulatory plastic surgery program, and Highland Hospital’s Complex Care Program, which provides care to patients with multiple, chronic illnesses, many of whom are homeless. Other closures would have included Fairmont Hospital’s Kitchen Retail program, which provides meals to staff and visitors, and Highland Hospital’s Tele-sitter program, which helps AHS staff remotely monitor patients’ wellbeing while they’re hospitalized.
The temporary pause buys the hospital system and the county time to try and figure out alternatives to layoffs, with the goal of minimizing impacts on health care services.
Supervisors Nate Miley and Nikki Fortunato Bas will lead the effort through an ad hoc committee of the supervisors, working with AHS, labor representatives, and other stakeholders.
“I’m greatly encouraged by the feedback we’ve received from the supervisors and the partnership we’ve experienced with the county,” said AHS CEO James Jackson at yesterday’s meeting.
“Alameda County patients and their families deserve a healthcare system that’s clean, safe, and well-staffed, a place where they can get the care they need and won’t go hungry when they visit,” Maria Betancourt, a specialist clerk at John George and the current AHS Chapter President for SEIU 1021 said in a statement. “It has been a long fight to get to this point, but this is a great step for our members and for healthcare in Alameda County. As the federal cuts approach, we will work with the Board and others to find every avenue to protect public healthcare and preserve jobs against these attacks.”
Jackson said the AHS trustees, the board that directly governs the hospital system, will meet Wednesday to further discuss delaying the layoffs and the plan to find savings.
Federal health care cuts to blame
The Alameda Health System is facing a massive drop in revenues because of H.R. 1, the “Big Beautiful Bill” passed by the Republican-controlled Congress last year.
That bill massively reduced funding for Medicaid, the insurance program that public hospitals like AHS heavily rely on. It imposed other cuts and requirements that amount to an unprecedented $1 trillion reduction in health care spending nationwide by the federal government.
“We should all keep in mind that the reason we’re all here is largely, exclusively because of H.R. 1,” Supervisor David Haubert said Tuesday.
Anticipating a $30 million drop in revenue this year and a $100 million budget hole in 2027, AHS leaders confirmed in December that they were looking at eliminating as many as 372 positions, including nurses, therapists, doctors, housekeeping staff, and other roles. In January, AHS published a plan scaling back the layoffs to about 188 positions. Hospital staff said at the time that even this level of cuts would significantly harm their ability to care for patients.
Exploring options to avoid staff reductions
On Feb. 25, the Alameda County Board of Supervisors signaled they were willing to work with AHS on solutions. At Tuesday’s meeting, the supervisors unanimously voted to identify alternative, non-patient-facing positions that could be cut to address the system’s budget shortfall.
Under the new plan, which wasn’t described in much detail, the county, county auditor, and AHS will examine behavioral health contract payments that could be reduced. Currently, the county and AHS have dozens of contracts with nonprofits to provide behavioral health services.
They also want to scrutinize AHS’s finances and potentially make adjustments to how AHS can borrow money from the county.
And county leaders said they will look into alternative service models with respect to the system’s intensive outpatient program, all with an eye toward saving money and avoiding staff layoffs.
A plan to slash health care jobs at Alameda County’s safety net hospital would impact mental health programs. Leaders hope to avoid this.
www.berkeleyside.orgUAW4811 UCSF Mission Bay Members & Supporters Protests Union Busting Tacitcs By UC Bosses & Regents
https://youtu.be/ZrU2rhEkSI4
Fourty thousand UAW 4811 UC workers are facing continued union busting tactics by the management and
regents over a new contract. They rallied at …the UCSF Mission Bay campus on 3/12/26 to protest the refusal of
management to provide figures on their economic demands and also the stalling by the UC management and
regents. Also former UAW member Oliver Ma who is running for California Lt. Governor spoke at the rally.
Production Of Labor Video Project
www.labormedia.net
Fourty thousand UAW 4811 UC workers are facing continued union busting tactics by the management and regents over a new contract. They rallied at the…
youtu.beUAW4811 UCSF Mission Bay Members & Supporters Protest Union Busting Tactics By UC Bosses & Regents
Four Union Strategies to Fight on A.I.
https://www.labornotes.org/2026/03/four-union-strategies-fight-ai
March 05, 2026 / Keith Brower Brownenlarge or shrink textlogin or register to comment
National Nurses United released “A.I. justice” principles last year that highlight …specific threats, like an automated algorithm deciding how many nurses to schedule on shift or which tests should be ordered for a patient. Photo: NNU
A corporate artificial intelligence frenzy is sowing fear for workers on a massive scale. Seventy-one percent of people in the U.S., according to a Reuters poll on A.I., are concerned “too many people will lose jobs.”
Wall Street and Big Tech are running a huge hype machine to back up their massive, risky investment in A.I., pledging it will drive a “productivity surge,” meaning fewer workers and more profits.
But workers can take heart that, so far, it’s mostly hot air. To date, A.I. is making few profits. It can be helpful at a few tasks—rough drafts of computer code, summaries of reams of data—but is rarely the equal of human talent otherwise.
Nonetheless, investors are on track to pour more than $5 trillion worldwide into A.I. over the next five years. To make good on that cash outlay, expect CEOs to sell A.I. as the salve for everything from logistics to loneliness.
A.I is a management power grab, disguised as an inevitable technical upgrade. To fight it, workers can use four strategies proven in the past: name the real problem; unionize it; ransom it; and block it.
NAME THE REAL PROBLEM
The first step for workers is to cut through the hype. At your job, what are the specific uses of automation or A.I. that management aims to roll out?
Which uses are likely to be a dud, and which are a real threat to union power, job security, and the quality of what you do? Are there uses that your co-workers want, on their own terms?
These tough questions are best answered collectively, with knowledge from different departments and job types, whether that discussion takes place in union meetings or on lunch breaks.
At the United Caucuses of Rank-and-File Educators conference last summer, teacher activists from across the country held a discussion like this. Many hated A.I. being pushed into the classroom. Others felt it could make onerous parts of their job easier.
The teachers opposed to A.I. shared examples of how it had been used against workers and how it was promoting plagiarism and misinformation. Participants keyed in on a few uses they might want as options, like class planning or reviewing students’ past work, but agreed it should never be mandated by management.
National Nurses United released “A.I. justice” principles last year that highlight specific threats, like an automated algorithm deciding how many nurses to schedule on shift or which tests should be ordered for a patient. The union argues that computer systems can’t replace human expertise.
Executives often tell on themselves. To stay ahead of management’s game, unions can recruit member volunteers to read what CEOs in your sector are bragging about in the business press and scour the web for what they’re promising their higher-ups.
In fact, the heaviest A.I. users are in the C-suite. A recent survey of the U.S. and five other countries found 87 percent of executives and 57 percent of managers were using A.I. tools, versus 27 percent of employees. These tools can’t nurse a patient, but they can hack a passable version of management’s tasks: surveilling workers, summarizing information, and telling investors what they want to hear.
Job cuts from A.I. may be a real threat in your sector, but not because automation can actually do your work well. Executives may not care whether students are nurtured, real facts are reported, or patients are healed. They just want to make a buck. A.I. gives them cover to allow the quality of work to degrade.
Software executive and critic Anil Dash recently observed that half a million tech workers have been laid off since the release of ChatGPT mainly because execs “now have A.I. to use as an excuse for going after workers they’ve wanted to cut all along.”
Junior programming jobs have been heavily cut, while senior engineers are kept on to fix the buggy code dreamed up by A.I. But where will the next generation of senior engineers come from, if they’re not learning on the job as junior coders? These short-sighted cuts are creating new leverage for experienced programmers, who could push worker-run solutions for training the next generation.
UNIONIZE IT
New tech could become an excuse to outsource your work to non-union hands. To keep it union, you can bargain contract language, make direct demands on management, and take a proactive union approach to learning technology.
In the 1970s and ’80s, Mike Parker, an Auto Workers electrician and Labor Notes co-founder, kept track of auto company plans for robotics and computers, and developed union training programs on the new gear.
When managers proposed to bring in the robots, they said non-union specialists would have to take on installation and maintenance. Parker and his co-workers asserted they were ready to handle the work on union terms, and often won.
It’s too bad the union as a whole didn’t follow his lead. Every decade since the late 1940s, auto company CEOs have made grand promises of automation by robotics, and Auto Workers top officers generally gave up the fight. Still, most job cuts were caused by work speed-up, mandatory overtime, and outsourcing to third-party parts suppliers and non-union Southern factories.
As the San Francisco-to-Oakland Bay Bridge got rebuilt two decades ago, private contractors planned to outsource the work on massive new welding machines to non-union workers. “The company came to the union and said, ‘We’ve got a contract with you, but you don’t have welders certified on those machines locally,’” said Mike Munoz, then a leader with the Pile Drivers in Oakland.
“Our union bought one of the machines and started teaching the members to weld on it,” said Munoz. “We can train our members to do anything. We certified all the welders who went out on the Bay Bridge. It became our work because we threw ourselves into it.”
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When it comes to new A.I. and automation schemes from management, workers can refuse to let non-union contractors take charge. An army of consultants has sprung up to advise bosses on A.I. implementation for hospitals and schools, grifting millions from actual education and care.
Your union contract may already have language requiring management to bargain over major changes in unit work. Where it doesn’t, you can push for specific new language. If you accept some A.I. tools, like to summarize a thousand pages of patient records, which union job classifications will run the robots and double-check their work? Keeping the work in union hands is a first step to steer what A.I. is and isn’t used to do.
RANSOM IT
Another union strategy worth considering: force management to pay workers extra, as a condition of rolling out new technology.
The most famous deal like this, for longshore workers, shows short-term gains and big long-term limits for the approach.
In a landmark 1960 agreement, the militant West Coast Longshore union (ILWU) agreed to allow mechanization and shipping containers at the ports, in exchange for expanded pay, pensions, and a guarantee of a certain number of union jobs at each port. If the port owners dropped hiring below that number, they still had to pay that number of union members indefinitely.
The agreement came with big tradeoffs, as members were split into three tiers with radically different job security. Only the A-tier got the guaranteed jobs or payouts. When port owners slashed hiring, A-tier longshore workers and union officers didn’t feel the urgency to organize the jobs in new hubs of the supply chain.
“The containers go inland,” said Peter Olney, who came into the union as a lead organizer decades later. “Do you follow the work inland, unloading and warehousing them? That fell by the wayside.”
Another kind of ransom can be won by those building out the new technology and its infrastructure. Construction workers have a particularly direct kind of leverage over the A.I. boom: it can’t be built without them.
Much of the massive data center construction behind A.I. is getting unionized, even in far-flung boomtowns. That’s because building trade unions have national networks of trained, traveling members to call up through their hiring halls, and can meet the labor demand fast.
In the next wave, many “hyperscale” data centers are planned to be 10 times the size of those already built. The largest will guzzle as much electricity as the entire city of Philadelphia.
The vast labor demand of those projects gives building trade unions leverage, if they seize it: to bring new members in, to turn down work on the projects facing the most local opposition, and to demand concessions for public services and the environment.
An upsurge of local grassroots campaigns blocked 25 data centers last year. When unions partner with community groups, they both can squeeze more from developers and governments, like dropping the billion-dollar data center tax giveaways that can bankrupt local schools and roads. In California, such alliances unionized gas and solar power plants and won a few community demands.
At best, these kinds of “ransom” deals can raise the costs for management to force in a new technology, and buy time for workers to go on offense with organizing.
BLOCK IT
With enough strength, workers may manage to draw the line against certain uses of A.I. altogether.
In their 2023 Hollywood strikes, the Writers Guild and Screen Actors won restrictions on the use of A.I. writing or replicas of actors’ faces and voices. But in a media industry that’s getting more consolidated and corporate every year, bosses are finding workarounds, and unions are fighting to keep up.
The NewsGuild launched a national campaign in December for “News, Not Slop,” using contract negotiations and public pressure to demand limits on A.I.-generated news content.
In their recent strike, 15,000 New York City nurses won language against some kinds of A.I. misuse.
Oil refinery Steelworkers, in national pattern bargaining this year, aim to block management from using A.I. tools to monitor workers’ movements, assess their productivity, and dish out automatic discipline.
Existing contract language on working conditions could be used against degrading uses of A.I. Use your discipline process to limit the use of automated demerits. Use worker oversight of safety to push back against allowing A.I. tools to make risky decisions. Use staffing limits to draw a line against bigger workloads disguised as high-tech efficiency.
The most degrading effect of A.I., after all, isn’t just to our work, but to our skills and imaginations. When music and movies are made by a robot cobbling together past works, it cheats audiences and artists alike of newer, wilder dreams.
Even in more rote work, we learn by doing. A.I. is no unstoppable force of progress. In fact, if it’s done how CEOs want, it would dry up the well of progress: worker know-how.
Standing up to management’s technological power grab is one big step to take responsibility for the world we make on the job—and to keep open the path to a better one.
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Keith Brower Brown is Labor Notes' Labor-Climate Organizer.
keith@labornotes.org
A corporate artificial intelligence frenzy is sowing fear for workers on a massive scale. Seventy-one percent of people in the U.S., according to a…
www.labornotes.orgWhat San Francisco Educators Won on Their Strike
https://jacobin.com/2026/03/strike-san-francisco-education-unions
INTERVIEW WITH
RYAN ALIASAKEYLAH HERNANDEZNATHALIE HRIZI
Over 6,000 public school educators in San Francisco went on strike last month for the first time in nearly 50 …years. We spoke to three of them about what they won, including coverage of skyrocketing health care costs and easing special education workloads.
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On February 9, over 6,000 K-12 teachers and paraprofessionals in the San Francisco Unified School District went on strike. (@UESF / X)
Jacobin‘s special spring issue, “Teen Jacobin,” is out soon. Follow this link to get a discounted subscription to our beautiful print quarterly.
This winter has seen historic strikes hit the United States on both coasts. In New York City, 15,000 nurses across three of the city’s largest private sector hospital systems walked out on January 12 and stayed on the picket lines for about a month, making it the largest and longest nurses’ strike in the city’s history. Meanwhile, in California and Hawaii, 31,000 health care workers employed by Kaiser Permanente across the two states struck from January 26 to February 23 in what their union describes as the largest open-ended health care strike in US history.
But historic labor actions were not limited to the health care sector. In San Francisco, over 6,000 K-12 teachers and paraprofessionals in the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) went on strike on February 9. The strike was the first for the district in almost fifty years; it ended with a tentative agreement between the district and the educators’ union, United Educators of San Francisco (UESF), on February 13.
UESF members voted to ratify the contract with a 92 percent “yes” vote at the end of the month. The union says the deal included major victories for workers on health care — getting the district to fully cover rapidly rising insurance costs — as well as pay increases, workload reductions for special education professionals, and the preservation and expansion of the school’s program to support unhoused students and their families. Jacobin’s Nick French recently sat down with three rank-and-file educator-leaders to talk about the strike and what they won.
NICK FRENCH
What are the main issues that led to the strike? And what was bargaining like such that educators decided to walk out?
RYAN ALIAS
This has been an eleven-month process. About 120 of us, as a bargaining team, have been putting together proposals that are in line with our members’ priorities. We started doing that almost a year ago, and then we were working to refine those.
Then we eventually started bargaining by presenting our proposals to the district. From there, we kept running into the district not listening to us and spending a lot of time striking through the things we presented to them. Throughout that process, we’ve been trying to communicate everything we possibly can to our members and families about what’s been happening at the table, and the inaction that we’ve been seeing from the district.
AKEYLAH HERNANDEZ
Our priorities were really member-generated. At the very beginning of the process, we sent surveys to all of our members and we held interview sessions so we could get their stories. The surveys and those interviews gave us a qualitative and quantitative perspective on our members’ priorities.
That gave rise to our top five priorities. We had two very community-focused priorities. We wanted language in our contract that declares our schools sanctuary schools. And we wanted to ensure that the shelter programs we have currently to support our families continued and were enshrined in our contract.
RYAN ALIAS
Those are the programs for unhoused students and their families.
AKEYLAH HERNANDEZ
It is pretty awesome that we have that; it came from our community and our educators working together. So we wanted to ensure it in our contract moving forward.
Our big priority, and one of our biggest wins, was getting health care paid for by the district, by our employer, particularly with a focus on our educator families. They were feeling the biggest impact of having to pay for dependents on their health care plans. For paraeducators like myself, if you had more than two dependents, it was an entire paycheck each month going to your health care.
We wanted equitable, living wages for educators. We have a lot of members with diverse salary ranges, so ensuring that we had equity around livable wages was a priority.
For paraeducators like myself, if you had more than two dependents, it was an entire paycheck each month going to health care costs.
Finally, we were asking for support systems for special education educators to reduce the workload that impacts them. We wanted to create a system of relieving that workload so that educators could adequately support our special education students.
NATHALIE HRIZI
Each contract struggle, in our view, has built on the last one. In the last contract negotiations, for 2023–25, the top issue was wages. We brought the floor for our hourly classified educators from $17 up to $30 an hour, and then they kept their stepwise pay increases. So some people experienced, in one contract struggle, an 80 percent raise.
We did the same thing with the pay for our certificated educators. And we loaded the bulk of the win onto the newest educators. So our newer educators are now making in the $70,000s when they start, instead of the upper $50,000s to lower $60,000s. By doing that, we felt we were addressing a critical issue for educators across the board.
But then, when we went back into the survey and interviews that Akeylah was talking about, what we were hearing was that for folks with one or two dependents, the raise had been almost nonexistent, because over the last three years, the increasing cost of health care had been eating up the raises. In January, my pay dropped because the health care costs had eaten up so much of the raise; the wage I got in January was actually lower than what I got in December.
So that became the issue in addition to special education, which is the only place where we had teacher vacancies this year.
RYAN ALIAS
Regarding the health care costs, my wife and I are both teachers in the district. It costs $1,500 every month for us and our two kids for health care. And health care costs just kept getting higher and higher.
We realized that this is one of the things that is keeping educators from living in the city and putting down roots. They have families and want to stay in the communities that depend on them, but they simply can’t afford to. And there are districts all over the Bay Area that provide free health care or incredibly subsidized health care.
That was something that was not only widely felt but also deeply felt by many of our members. And it became something that the city really adopted and cared about, and they backed us on the line for it.
AKEYLAH HERNANDEZ
One of our biggest rallying cries throughout this contract negotiation was about bringing stability to our school district. Those vacancies that Nathalie mentioned earlier are a huge part of it.
On turnover, one of the stats that stuck out to me the most from our fact-finding report, which concluded that roughly 50 percent of our members had been hired in just the last five years. That includes me. That is not a stable school district when half of the people working in your classrooms supporting students are new, hired within the last five years. That doesn’t even capture the people who were hired within the last five years who have already left; it just captures the people who ended up staying.
NATHALIE HRIZI
The special education proposal was the hardest to explain to community members. The educators who are in special education, and the students and families who are receiving special education services, understand the issues: how the turnover is affecting them and how the heavy reliance on outside contractors is affecting them. Students are getting speech services on Zoom with someone who’s in Hawaii, but they could be hiring a speech and language pathologist right here who could meet with them every week.
That was one of our tasks over the last year, to center that fight — not because everyone understood it or knew the ins and outs of it, but because it was so important to the stability of our schools. If we don’t get special education right, general education won’t be right. The students receiving special education services are in all our classes; the stability of that program affects the stability of the schools. So while it’s a little harder to grasp than health care, it was very important to us that we center this particular issue.
That is not a stable school district when half of the people working in your classrooms supporting students are new, from within the last five years.
We ended up with the move toward what we call a “workload model” in our contract. In special education, educators have historically been assigned caseloads based on a number of students for whom they manage cases. Each case could require vastly different amounts of work for assessing, managing, and providing services.
The workload model moderates the caseload assignments by taking workload (assessment, services, and so on) into account. So students who require larger workloads are weighted more, which can reduce the overall caseload (the number of students whose cases are being managed by an educator). We also got additional time for special education educators to do their work.
That was huge — the district fought us tooth and nail on that. If you’re in special education, you are doing a set of paperwork and a set of assessments and a set of work that no educator in general education is doing. We have folks who have been in special education for twenty years who said, “I can’t do it anymore. I’m going to go into the general ed classroom, and I won’t do this thing that I’ve been specialized to do and that I have training and experience for.”
NICK FRENCH
You all have already spoken to how members were kept involved, especially in terms of formulating contract demands. Is there anything else you wanted to mention about the organizing that laid the groundwork for the strike, in terms of your coworkers but also the broader community? What did it look like to build community support?
NATHALIE HRIZI
We were forced into striking. We never knew what was going to happen until the week before it happened. We would have been just as happy having settled with strong agreements in April, which the district could have done. This was a decision on the part of our bosses to put us in a situation where we had no choice but to do this.
At the same time, it was our view five years ago that to make the substantive changes we needed to make, we would have to be ready to strike. That doesn’t mean we wanted to or had to ― it means we had to be ready to. Because it’s not something you get ready for in a week.
So it has been a multiyear project of changing the way we interact with the membership of UESF at every single level. The central level is the site structures — the members at the school sites who are elected to take leadership in organizing their sites were key. We could not have been ready to do this without what we’d done over the last five years to engage those structures.
Part of that was the big bargaining team. There’s a difference between having fifteen people arguing about contract language versus 120 people who can go right back to their sites and say, “You should have seen what happened last night.” In the last contract fight, we built the biggest bargaining team we’d ever built in UESF, which was sixty-five people. When we went up to 120 people this time, I think people thought we were a little bit nuts. But that worked out really well for us.
That connection to the sites from the elected leadership was critically important for doing what we did in regard to the community piece over the last five years. We have tried to find ways to authentically engage with our communities and not just provide leadership but take leadership knowledge from them. On the fight around housing and the fight around immigrant rights, we are in partnership with organizations that are leading the fight from their experience, and that really gave us guidance around how to carry out this fight and what the ultimate goal is.
It was our view that to make the substantive changes we needed to make, we would have to become ready to strike. It doesn’t mean we wanted to ― we had to be ready to.
What we won on housing is not where we want to be. The stay-over program is a beautiful program, one of its kind — it offers unhoused students and their families a safe, warm place to sleep when school is not in session. But it’s a stopgap for a much larger issue. Our educators and our families need actual housing. If you look at our initial proposal, we had ways to get us to that housing, and we’re going to keep fighting for that. What we did get was protection of this existing program that does a lot, but it doesn’t do enough.
On the fourth day of the strike, at Embarcadero Plaza, this mom, Roxana, gave testimony, and it was incredible. The leadership came from her and the other moms, and it was a very collaborative relationship rather than a transactional one. That was the foundation for what happened in the strike: One, the community agreed with the demands. They were willing to give up time for their kids and be out there with us because they cared so much. Two, they had seen us already in the places we needed to be. We accompany immigrant families to the courthouse, so they know we’re there. We’re at the stay-over program. We created it — that was our social workers, not the district, who created that program, so they can see us in the fight with them.
RYAN ALIAS
As a bargaining team rep at my high school, Balboa, and working with communications, the thing that I kept in mind, and that I know many of us kept in mind, was the importance of patient preparation and transparency throughout the process. This is not something that we turn on a dime for.
As a union, we chose to make becoming strike-ready part of the process of how we organize. Part of that is being as transparent as we possibly can be about everything that is happening at the table, every single night we bargain — even if we are just passing a proposal to the district, and the district is just crossing everything out. Our communications team was trying to put together the clearest and most easily accessible version of events so that every member at every site could, with a couple clicks or by going to a quick meeting, hear exactly what happened that night.
When it comes to the community — for our members, going on strike is a scary thing. It is an act of trust. It was humbling for me as a parent and an educator to see the city and the family members support our union members. They were out in the streets in numbers that got bigger every single day we were out on strike. You can see some photos of Market Street being locked down with over 20,000 people. That includes people who don’t have kids or who don’t have students in SFUSD. But also, we had parents and children and everybody else out supporting us.
There was this district narrative that there was a loss of learning happening during the strike. But for my kids and for every SFUSD student out there, this was absolutely a week of education. We learned that the working class is powerful and that our voices are stronger when we lift them together. We learned that we may have different needs and be in different situations, but when we look at each other with the idea that an injury to you is an injury to me, we are strong and we can make real change in one of the wealthiest cities in the world.
So I want to push back on this idea that there was lost learning, because this was a week of education for our members, our families, and our students. And the district learned too. . . .
AKEYLAH HERNANDEZ
I actually joined the bargaining team my first week of work in SFUSD. So I approached it keeping in mind that I’m very new and that I wanted to learn a lot. There are a lot of longtime teachers and educators at my site who have been in the district for decades. I came to them and I said, “I want to listen to you, and I want to bring what you know and what you are an expert on back into bargaining, and I will do that with everything in me.”
That was the way that I approached organizing at my site level. A lot of the time people would come to me with issues unrelated to what was going on with bargaining. I mean, it’s all related, but it wasn’t something I’m bringing back to the bargaining team to be like, “We need to really go hard on this proposal.” It was about something else regarding our working conditions or the way our school site operates. I found that the more I was holding this space for organizing around our contract, the more I was connecting with people in a deeper way and gaining their trust. The trust-building on our site level was fundamental to the way we won these victories.
NICK FRENCH
We’ve already spoken some about what the union won. Are there other victories you want to emphasize?
NATHALIE HRIZI
There are multiple victories here. One of them was getting a 5 percent pay increase for certificated employees [salaried educators who hold a Department of Education license that is required for their role] and an 8.5 percent wage increase for classified employees [student-facing educational support professionals, who are paid hourly], along with an additional floating holiday, which is equal to about a 1 percent raise. That gives our classified workers some relief over the longer periods where they don’t have work. That, along with fully employer-covered health benefits; there will be some relief this year, and then starting in January 2027, it will be covered in perpetuity.
We achieved sanctuary-school language and the protection of the stay-over program for our unhoused families as well as a joint commitment to supporting unhoused families. We won the special education compliance period, which essentially gives more time for our special educators to invest in their work to meet the needs of students, as well as a workload model.
We had other wins too. We got a committee to look into paraeducator retirement — they have no retirement benefits right now. We got protections against artificial intelligence and contracting out. The district tried to gut our substitute proposal, and we protected them and got them a raise and cancellation pay.
The wins are great. But the bigger win, in my view, is the transformation we experienced in our city. Educator strikes are fundamentally political strikes. We don’t sit at the point of production; we don’t sit at the point of distribution, like when the Teamsters go on strike. That’s a totally different thing: you’re hitting the bosses right in their pockets.
It was humbling to see the city and the family members support educators. They were out in the streets in numbers that got bigger every single day we were out on strike.
One way of looking at it is that an educator strike could be disruptive to our community. We don’t think it was. But it’s also a political act. In taking this act on the basis of the right demands, we forced the political structure of the city, the leadership of the city, into a contradiction that they then had to overcome.
To me, that was a huge victory. This city feels different right now than it’s felt in twenty years. Everyone supported this strike. The first day, if you looked at who was honking for the pickets, it was union cars — it was your Toyotas and your trucks. By the fourth day, the BMWs and Mercedeses and Teslas were getting in on it too. The popularity of successful collective action was transformative for our city.
I would say it builds on what we’ve seen across the nation, like the Minneapolis walkout on January 30 — a confrontation with the billionaire agenda at the highest level — was recreated here. The mayor, a billionaire Levi Strauss heir who talks a good game about affordability, didn’t know what to do with us. We forced him to acknowledge the power of collective action. There are three union contracts coming up for the city itself, and the question of collective action in San Francisco is now on the table in a way it hasn’t been since, I would say, the ’70s, or even the general strike of 1934.
RYAN ALIAS
In my experience, it does not often feel like San Francisco is a city for working-class people. It feels like it is a city that uses labor. And then, eventually that labor needs to leave because they cannot afford it; it’s a revolving door.
This week was one of the most empowering things for working-class people that I’ve felt in my life. The contract wins, the line items are important — health care and the workload model and all those things. But they’re all folded into generalized stability for this district, which was our main focus: we want to stabilize the district for working-class people, for their families, for our students, so that they can feel like they are a part of this city, not just being used by this city.
It is something that I feel other unions can look at, seeing what was possible. We wanted health care — the district told us that was impossible for almost a year. And that is something that we get to hand off to future educators fifteen, twenty years down the line. This is a win for working-class people who we will never meet.
NICK FRENCH
Anything else?
NATHALIE HRIZI
We have to acknowledge that we are part of the We Can’t Wait campaign, a coordinated effort of more than thirty locals up and down the state. The United Teachers of Richmond in California’s East Bay went out on strike for the first time in their history in December 2025. They won health care; they won protections for international teachers; they won special education. And we followed.
The local unions participating in We Can’t Wait have aligned our contract end dates; we are bargaining individually but coordinating a campaign to establish standards in key areas across California. We feel very proud to have done what we could to contribute to those standards, standards all students and educators should enjoy across the state. The other locals in the We Can’t Wait campaign are all on track to do that. San Diego educators won their agreement. They did not go on strike; they didn’t have to. But they won an agreement that they’re proud of. The other locals are all working in the same way.
The next battle is the state. The state government has to fully fund public education in the way that it needs to be funded, and so does the federal government. We’re not stopping here.
Over 6,000 public school educators in San Francisco went on strike last month for the first time in nearly 50 years. We spoke to three of them about…
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