Thinking Outside the Box with AI: Adapting 20th Century Labor and Employment Law to 21st Century Algorithms that Select, Monitor, and Control Employees

Authors

Roger C. Hartley, The Catholic University of America, Columbus School of Law

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2025

Abstract

A transformative era is unfolding in the rapidly changing world of work. Increasingly, to a hitherto unimaginable degree, employers are able to deploy predictive analytics—artificial intelligence (AI)—that processes data about workers and their behaviors to identify patterns and make algorithmic predictions. There is a widely-held view among labor practitioners, scholars, and non- specialists that our current labor and employment regulatory scheme is insufficient to address many, perhaps most, of the workplace issues that workplace AI systems create. The thesis of this article is that skepticism is largely unfounded as it seriously underestimates the capacity of currently enacted federal labor and employment law to address and resolve workplace conflicts created by an employer’s deployment of AI, robotics, and other automation at the workplace.

Recommended Citation

Roger C. Hartley, Thinking Outside the Box with AI: Adapting 20th Century Labor and Employment Law to 21st Century Algorithms that Select, Monitor, and Control Employees, 32 Va. J. Soc. Pol’y & L. 104 (2025).