IF GOV. GAVIN NEWSOM WANTS TO BE PRESIDENT of the United States then he must address artificial intelligence’s impact on workers. That’s the message sent in Sacramento on Wednesday by members of the AFL-CIO, a union with a combined 2.3 million members.
In attendance at a news conference, held steps from the California state capitol, were AFL-CIO president Liz Shuler, California Labor Federation president Lorena Gonzalez, and the heads of five state labor federations, including from traditional early primary states like Iowa and states vying for earlier spots in the primary state calendar like Georgia and North Carolina.
The California Labor Federation wants a variety of statewide regulations to protect workers, including limitations on how managers can use predictive AI, advance notice of AI-related job cuts, and curbs on workplace surveillance. And it has signalled a willingness to play hardball.
“I don’t think you’re going to have a lot of motivation to walk precincts for somebody who won’t engage working class voters on the very things that are taking away their jobs,” Gonzalez said of Newsom’s widely expected 2028 presidential run.
The pressure campaign on the governor underlines not only how important such protections are to unions but also how much Newsom is expected to resist them. The state faces a projected $18 billion budget deficit for the coming fiscal year and increasingly relies on AI for tax revenue. Meanwhile tech companies like Meta, OpenAI and startup investor Andreessen Horowitz have stood up political action committees to support pro-AI candidates.
“If we hurt the bottom line then that’s also going to hurt the state and I wouldn’t want to be the governor who caused a recession especially if I may be running for a federal office,” said Julie Salley, a consultant on the state assembly Consumer Privacy and Protection Committee, in comments to a group of students Tuesday.
Pro-worker bills fail to gain traction
Last year, several AI bills backed by labor unions were vetoed by Newsom or failed to clear the legislature, including a bill that sought to protect truckers from autonomous vehicles that fell short after two vetoes by Newsom.
A spokesperson for the governor, Tara Gallegos, said Newsom lead the state to the most comprehensive and pro-worker approach to AI in the country. “No Governor has done more than Governor Gavin Newsom to regulate AI in a way that protects workers without killing jobs or innovation,” she wrote in an email.
“If we hurt the bottom line then that’s also going to hurt the state and I wouldn’t want to be the governor who caused a recession especially if I may be running for a federal office.” Julie Salley, Consumer Privacy and Protection Committee consultant
Union leaders Wednesday framed AI as one issue where the public broadly supports regulation. A national Gallup poll released in September 2025 showed 80% of Americans want regulation to protect them from AI even if that means slowing down innovation. Surveys in late 2025 by Carnegie California and TechEquity similarly found that a vast majority of Californians want protections from AI. President Trump and some Republicans in Congress have moved to discourage state-level AI regulation. Meanwhile some political observers predict the influence of tech interests will grow rapidly.
“We have this golden moment before it’s too late to pass AI laws at the state level,” Gonzalez said at the event Wednesday. “Be on the right side of history.”
Gonzalez announced that the labor federation intends to sponsor or support two dozen bills this year to address how AI negatively impacts workers and called on Newsom to support them. Thus far, she said, the governor has failed to address what’s coming. The governor’s office did not respond to a request to respond to that accusation.
Iowa Federation of Labor president Charlie Wishman said Newsom should expect to hear questions about his record on protecting workers from AI among union members and voters ahead of presidential caucuses in his state.
“You’re literally the person in the state who can actually help the rest of the nation on this,” he said.
For people with jobs, concerns about AI go beyond job loss. Evidence is mounting that the technology can fuel wage theft, lead to higher rates of injuries in warehouses, diminish a person’s self worth, drive people toward lower skill roles, or surveil workers in order to prevent union organizing.
This year the California Labor Federation plans to support bills including Senate Bill 947, a reboot of a bill from last year that, if passed, would keep businesses from making management decisions about employees based solely on a prediction by an AI model. In a nod to Newsom, the new version gets rid of a requirement that businesses notify people before AI is used to decide whether to discipline or fire a worker. The California Labor Federation is also supporting bills that require employers to give advanced notice when they plan to replace jobs with AI, and a bill to prevent AI-powered workplace surveillance, which failed to receive enough support in a vote last fall.
Walking the AI tightrope
Gov. Newsom, now in his final year in office, has walked a political tightrope on AI, attempting to strike a balance between regulating the technology and supporting business interests benefitting from it. For example, a 2023 executive order that influences how the state treats generative AI both implores state agencies to take steps to protect against potential harms and find opportunities to use the technology. A frontier AI working group formed at Newsom’s behest last year introduced recommendations for how to strike a balance between guardrails to protect people and innovation that benefits business interests. In his final state of the state address last month, he said “no technology holds more promise and more peril, to jobs, to our economy, to our way of life than artificial intelligence.”
AI backers are moving quickly to push politicians onto their side of the line. Money spent by companies to lobby the governor is not specified in state records but tech companies are spending more on lobbying in Sacramento. For the first time, Anthropic spent $200,000 lobbying legislators and the governor in Sacramento last year, following OpenAI’s first venture into advocating for its position in the state capitol. Meta spent $4.6 million to lobby California officials last year, the most it has ever spent to advocate their positions in Sacramento and earlier this week poured $65 million into political action committees to support pro-AI political candidates.
Josh Lowenthal, a Democratic Assemblymember from Long Beach, said he’s frightened by the formation of pro-AI PACs because of the potential for even more tech wealth to follow.
“The alarm bells should be on for all of us because we have one, two, three years before this money gets so deeply entrenched with the current crop of elected officials that it can be devastating to an entire generation,” he said.
Jeremiah Kimelman contributed to this story.
This story originally appeared in CalMatters.