A friend called me in April with a good question, and I answered it with real confidence and got it exactly backwards.
Her employer had rolled out something that scored how fast people cleared a work queue, and she had watched her name slide down a ranking nobody told her existed. Was that allowed? So I did what I always do: notice, disclosure duties, the bills moving in Sacramento and Springfield. I was accurate and useless, because I never asked the question that actually decides the answer.
Not what are your rights. Where would you go to enforce them, and who would be in the room when you got there?
For most American workers, the answer is a private proceeding, one person at a time, no jury, no class, no public docket. Which brings me to a bill that would change exactly that — and that, as far as I can tell, nobody has written about. Searching turned up the sponsor's press release, a trade outlet, a few law-firm alerts and a tracker; no major outlet appears to have covered its introduction.
The half of the bill that got quoted
On June 18, 2026, Senators Edward Markey and Brian Schatz introduced the No Robot Bosses Act, with a companion, the Stop Spying Bosses Act. (Some write-ups date it to July; the sponsor's release, the bill document and the tracker all say June 18.) Endorsed by the ACLU, the AFL-CIO, EPIC and five other labor and civil-liberties groups, it sits at the first stage of the legislative process: introduced, not marked up, not voted.
It is not a ban on workplace AI. The operative words are that an employer may not rely predominantly on an automated decision system in making a work-related decision. The machine can be in the room; it just cannot be the one deciding. Predominantly carries enormous weight, and compliance departments will argue about it for a decade.
Around that sit the duties everyone quotes: granular disclosure — what data is collected, what the system measures and how, and (my favorite detail) the trade name of the tool — updated at least seven days before a change. Where a workforce is represented, the employer must give advance notice to the bargaining unit and bargain in good faith over the decision and its effects. Statutory damages run $5,000 to $20,000 per violation, and the private right of action belongs to workers and to labor organizations, which may sue on a worker's behalf.
The companion bill covers the watching rather than the deciding: employers could not collect employee data while a worker is off duty, in a break room, a prayer space, or at home. Markey's framing: "No worker should be fired or disciplined by a machine."
The sentence nobody quoted
Deep in the enforcement section:
Notwithstanding any other provision of law, no predispute arbitration agreement or predispute joint-action waiver shall be valid or enforceable with respect to any alleged violation of section 3, 4, 5, or 8.
Two bits of jargon. Predispute means you agreed before anything went wrong — first day, onboarding stack, nothing to argue about yet. A joint-action waiver is the promise not to join a class or collective action, caught whether or not it sits inside an arbitration agreement.
Why does one sentence outrank everything above it? Look at what it is pointed at. Among private-sector nonunion employees, 56.2 percent are subject to mandatory employment arbitration procedures — roughly 60.1 million American workers with no access to the courts to protect their employment rights — and of those, 41.1 percent have also waived class-action rights: 24.7 million people. The survey is Alexander Colvin's, dean of Cornell's ILR School.
The forum is not neutral either. Earlier work by Colvin and Katherine Stone found employees in mandatory arbitration winning only just about a fifth of the time — 21.4 percent — with the typical award at 21 percent of the median federal-court award. Fewer wins, smaller wins. A magnificent new right with the forum left untouched is a promise written on water.
Congress knows this, because the Court told it. In 2018, in Epic Systems Corp. v. Lewis, the Court held the Federal Arbitration Act requires enforcing individual-arbitration clauses with class waivers in employment contracts. Justice Gorsuch was pointed about the remedy: "The policy may be debatable but the law is clear," and "While Congress is of course always free to amend this judgment, we see nothing suggesting it did so in the NLRA."
Congress has accepted that invitation exactly once. In March 2022, for sexual assault and sexual harassment disputes, it enacted that no predispute arbitration agreement or predispute joint-action waiver shall be valid or enforceable. Same sentence, different harm.
Two design details deserve a closer look. It expressly spares an arbitration provision in a collective bargaining agreement — voiding the arbitration your employer imposed, not the one your union negotiated. Paired with labor organizations' standing to sue, that makes the collective the enforcer. Employer counsel spotted it early: in 2023, lawyers at Epstein Becker & Green flagged the waivers as invalid or unenforceable with respect to ADS use, analyzing the 2023 bill, whose section numbers differ.
Here is where these disputes go today. In a complaint filed in mid-July 2026, twenty-six unnamed Meta workers alleged violations of protected-leave and discrimination law and said they wish to pursue their claims individually in arbitration. An Associated Press account describes allegations of keystroke and activity-monitoring data, AI token-usage dashboards; Meta denies it, saying decisions "were and are made by people, not AI." Nothing is proved, and I am not saying any company used AI to pick who to fire. The point is the destination — individually, in arbitration, before a fact was tested in public.
Notice, on its own, has already been tried
We do not have to speculate. Two states have run the experiment.
California went furthest. AB 1898 would require written notice at least 90 days before a workplace AI tool is first deployed, to any worker likely to be affected and to that worker's exclusive bargaining representative — and the sting is in the mechanics: the tool could not go live until all affected workers have returned their signed notices. The sanction is up to five hundred dollars per employee per violation.
Where is it? The last line on the Legislature's own history page reads held under submission, dated May 14, 2026, after the bill reached the Assembly Appropriations suspense file; CalMatters' tracker agrees. August 31 was the last day for each house to pass bills — a deadline a bill that had sat in the suspense file since mid-May was never well placed to meet. I am not going to narrate an ending I did not watch; that history page is one click, and it settles the question either way. Its predecessor, SB 7, was vetoed by Gov. Gavin Newsom in October 2025, over what the veto message called unfocused notification requirements.
Illinois has the opposite problem: its law passed. HB 3773 took effect on January 1, 2026, making it a civil rights violation to use AI with a discriminatory effect, or to fail to give notice of it. On what notice means, the statute says only that the Department shall adopt any rules necessary. Then, on June 2, 2026, the state's human rights department announced it was withdrawing and postponing its proposed rules, with no replacement timeline. The duty binds employers regardless.
The strongest case against all of this
Let me put the other side properly, because some of it is good.
On arbitration itself, the U.S. Chamber's Institute for Legal Reform published a study finding employees three times more likely to win in arbitration than in court, winning twice the money on average. Hold it carefully: it is the business lobby's own study, counting cases that reached an award and silent about claims never filed. But the core survives: with a strong claim and a lawyer, arbitration can be quicker and cheaper than a federal docket.
On the regulation, the center-right Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, or ITIF, argues the Markey–Schatz bills regulate workplace technologies based on how much data they collect rather than how employers use it, pointing at Illinois biometrics litigation, where White Castle faced a potential $17 billion in damages over fingerprint scans before settling for $9.4 million. The worry is real: damages multiplied by every employee and every scan produce numbers untethered from harm.
Then the "we already have law for this" position, argued in February 2026 before a House subcommittee by a former EEOC chief counsel now at Littler, who testified the country already has a well-established technology-neutral legal framework capable of addressing most AI-related misconduct. A former Labor Department official at the same hearing wanted the opposite.
The sharpest objection comes from someone sympathetic to the goal. Writing in the Yale Law Journal about the 2022 carve-out, David Horton showed that because Congress inserted it inside the Federal Arbitration Act, it only governs if the FAA governs — and where a case falls through the FAA's cracks, state law applies, with many states requiring arbitration where federal law does not. His essay is about that law, not this bill, but it is the right question to bring to Section 9(f).
What an Italian courier can find out, and how fast
Italy answered a version of this question four years ago, and its answer runs through a union office rather than a private conference room.
Legislative Decree 104 of June 27, 2022 — the Decreto Trasparenza — requires employers to inform workers about automated decision and monitoring systems bearing on hiring, management, termination, task assignment, surveillance and evaluation. What must be handed over is startling by American standards: the logic and functioning of the systems, the parameters used to train them, the control measures over automated decisions, and the metrics' potentially discriminatory impacts.
Be precise rather than flattering: this is not California's ninety days. In the gazette text the information is owed before the work activity begins, and any change needs written notice at least 24 hours ahead — Italy front-loads the duty rather than imposing a waiting period before a tool is switched on. The load-bearing difference is that the same disclosure must also be made to the workplace union representatives and, failing those, to the territorial union branches. The right is not only yours; it belongs simultaneously to a body with lawyers and a filing cabinet.
Which matters because of what such a body can do. Under Article 28 of the Statuto dei Lavoratori, local union branches petition the labor court, which acts within the following two days — summoning the parties, taking summary information, and ordering the employer by immediately enforceable decree to stop the conduct and undo its effects. Two days. Not two years.
It has been used. On June 20, 2023, a labor judge in Palermo declared the conduct anti-union when a delivery platform refused three CGIL federations the information the statute required, and ordered it to disclose how the system assigns orders and scores couriers for priority access to slots — on penalty of 200 euros a day. Italian commentators call it an individual right and a matching collective right.
None of it can be signed away on a first morning, because Italian law never let the paperwork do that job. Employment disputes may go to arbitrators only where the law or a collective agreement provides, and waivers of workers' rights under mandatory provisions are not valid — though the worker has six months from the end of the job to say so.
The groundwork came earlier: at the turn of 2021, a Bologna court ruled a platform's ranking algorithm discriminated against gigging delivery workers for failing to distinguish protected reasons for withholding labor — illness, striking — from trivial ones, on a petition by three unions. Eurofound records the court recognizing the right of trade unions to seek protection on their behalf.
It is not a clean win. A 2023 decree narrowed the duty to systems that are integralmente automatizzati — fully automated — and platforms argue a human in the loop puts them outside it; Italian scholars have catalogued the inconsistencies in the amended wording. Sound familiar? It is the fight over predominantly, in another language. Europe moves anyway: the EU's platform work directive extends union consultation to decisions likely to lead to the introduction of automated monitoring systems, due in force by December 2, 2026.
Just imagine the version where only the first half passes
Picture 2029. Some version of the notice half is law — the popular half, the half with a press conference. Section 9(f) came out in committee, quietly, in exchange for the neutrality that made a floor vote possible.
Compliance is excellent. On your first morning a portal walks you through a beautifully formatted disclosure: data categories, metrics, appeal address, the trade name of the tool — generated by a vendor from the system's own configuration file, a model describing a model. Three screens later, in the same session, you accept the mutual dispute resolution agreement. Nobody has lied to you.
Two years on, a scheduling model moves you onto a shift pattern that quietly ends your second job. You appeal; a reviewer declines. You find a lawyer, who asks the question I failed to ask my friend, and the answer is a private proceeding, one worker at a time. Eleven people on your floor got the same reassignment for the same reason and none of you will ever learn it — because in algorithmic management the pattern is the case, and an individual proceeding cannot see a pattern.
Who else is watching, and from where
The striking thing about this bill is not that people disagree. It is that they disagree about the wrong clause.
A piece on the blog of the Georgetown Journal on Poverty Law & Policy records employers using AI to determine employees' propensity to organize, to monitor communications, and to administer quotas that disadvantage union supporters — the surveillance layer and the collective-rights layer are the same layer. Harvard Law School's Center for Labor and a Just Economy would route impact-assessment results to workers and their organizations, not workers alone. Antonio Aloisi, who wrote the book on algorithmic bosses with Valerio De Stefano, has run this comparison for years.
Opposite them, ITIF and the Chamber argue in good faith that this regulates collection rather than use, and that private forums serve workers better than crowded dockets.
Now notice what nobody in that lineup is arguing about. The win rates have a study on each side, and you have just read both. Whether a right that lands in a mandatory individual forum is a right in any practical sense — that is the actual question, and almost no one is debating it.
What does this mean for you?
Go find the sentence. Offer letter, handbook, onboarding portal. Search for "Dispute Resolution," "Mutual Arbitration" and "Class Action Waiver"; the waiver can sit on its own, which is why the bill catches it either way.
Work out whose clause it is. If a union contract covers you, your arbitration route may be one your bargaining unit negotiated, and the bill deliberately leaves those alone.
Ask the Italian questions in writing, even with no right to an answer. What system, what does it measure, what trained it, who reviews its output, how do I contest a decision? Asking as a group changes the temperature even where it creates no duty.
If you are in Illinois or California, read the primary source. The Illinois duty took effect in January and its rules were pulled in June — the absence of rules is not the absence of the law. AB 1898 has not moved since May 14, and the Legislature's history page says so first.
If you write to a Senate office, name the section. "Section 9(f) of S. 4833" gets a different reply than "AI in the workplace."
If you manage people, document the human step. The bill's standard is predominantly, and whether a recorded human decision clears that line is the fight, not the answer — the disclosure duties bind either way.
The lesson, as I see it
A right without a forum is a preference, and we have spent a decade quietly converting American employment rights into preferences — not by repealing anything, but by moving where the argument happens.
The notice half is not theater; it is good, and more granular than anything the states have managed. But look at the record: one state's version has been stuck in committee since spring, another's is in force with its rules withdrawn, and the earlier California bill died at a governor's desk over the notice requirements themselves. Notice is the part that gets negotiated down. Section 9(f) either exists or it does not.
Italy's advantage is not that Italians care more. It is architectural, and it predates this technology: the information right was attached to a body that already had a two-day route into open court, and the law never let an individual contract send statutory disputes into private arbitration. We cannot import the Statuto dei Lavoratori. We can import one sentence, and Congress has written it once already.
Gorsuch's invitation has been open since 2018, and someone has finally drafted a reply. Whether it survives the stage where the quotable half is kept and the load-bearing half traded away depends on whether anyone reads past the press release.
I would like the second half of this bill to be the part that stays. I would also like to have asked my friend a better question in April.
If this was useful, send it to whoever in your life signed something on their first day and never read past the second page. The HAIA Foundation writes these for exactly that conversation — and you can pick up the next one here.