With Congress on the sidelines, union contracts are among the strongest guardrails American workers have against artificial intelligence . Why it matters: Nearly 90% of the U.S. workforce lacks union representation, leaving about 130 million workers without that leverage as companies use AI to rewrite job descriptions and cut jobs. What they're saying: The only meaningful guardrails around workplace AI are happening "at the bargaining table, where workers are showing up and demanding protections," NewsGuild-CWA President Jon Schleuss tells Axios. - "AI is something we can negotiate," Schleuss says. "Without a contract and without a union, you have no say." - Former FTC Commissioner Alvaro Bedoya notes that union-negotiated rules could…
AI is moving from chat and web search to delegated work. Why it matters: The frontier AI labs have spent years promising that effective AI agents will act as our minions in the workplace and at home and that might soon be a reality. The big picture: Use of Codex — OpenAI's agentic coding and work platform — is accelerating, according to a new report from OpenAI, Columbia, Duke and the University of Pennsylvania. The researchers separate Codex users into three categories: OpenAI employees, outside organizations and individual users. Then they measured usage of Codex versus ChatGPT, by tokens. - 99.8% of OpenAI employees' output tokens were produced with Codex, compared to 63% for organizations and 16.5% for individuals. - OpenAI's…
Data: Bureau of Labor Statistics; Note: "White-collar core" includes finance, insurance, information, and professional and business services; Chart: Axios Visuals Usually, when the economy grows, so does employment in the kinds of office jobs that form the backbone of modern corporate life. It hasn't been true lately, and that may solve a key mystery of the 2020s' economy. The big picture: While overall employment trends have been steady, companies have successfully squeezed more out of a falling number of workers in the sectors that are the major sources of white-collar office jobs. - These sectors — finance, insurance, information, and professional and business services — normally add jobs steadily outside of recessions. In the last…