Paolo Agnolin (Princeton University)
Valentina González-Rostani
AI and other digital technologies are reshaping work, yet their effects on labor-market institutions are still not well understood. Research on technology and unions has focused largely on robots, leaving open how newer digital tools influence worker organizing and collective bargaining. We argue that technology matters not only because it can replace labor, but because it changes how work is organized. We distinguish among displacement, augmentation, and monitoring technologies, and show that each type affects workplace interaction, job stability, and managerial control in different ways. These changes, in turn, shape both workers demand for collective protection and their ability to organize. They also create different bargaining priorities, including training, shared implementation, limits on surveillance, and job security. We test these ideas with a two-level design. First, using European Social Survey data from 15 countries between 2012 and 2024, we match occupations to emerging technologies and assess links to union membership, autonomy, job satisfaction, and political attitudes. Second, we analyze over 40,000 Canadian collective agreements from 1993 to 2025 with text analysis and an LLM-based AI exposure measure. Results show varied effects: some technologies raise unionization, while others weaken it and worsen worker outcomes significantly for many employees.