ITUC AI Governance at Work (2023–ongoing)

The International Trade Union Confederation's AI Governance at Work campaign is its coordinated, multi-year effort to make workers and their unions central to every AI governance process — from international standard-setting at the ILO and G20, to national regulatory frameworks, to workplace-level collective bargaining. Launched under the four-year mandate set at the 5th ITUC World Congress (Melbourne, November 2022), the campaign operates on three simultaneous tracks: binding international standards, intergovernmental engagement, and collective bargaining support for affiliates.

Approach

The campaign's theory of change is that durable AI accountability requires enforceable rights inside the employment relationship — the right to know what automated systems decide, the right to appeal, and the right to human review — and that these rights must be anchored in law and contract rather than corporate discretion. On the standards track, the ITUC coordinated affiliated national union federations across the Global South and North to press the ILO for a binding Convention on Decent Work in the Platform Economy, covering approximately 150 million platform workers whose conditions are governed by algorithmic systems with no collective bargaining access. On the intergovernmental track, it engaged G20 Labour Ministers under successive presidencies and presented at the Paris AI Action Summit (February 2025), demanding enforceable worker-participation rights in AI governance frameworks rather than voluntary social dialogue commitments. On the collective bargaining track, it published guidance and documented best-practice agreements — including contracts negotiated by affiliates such as the Communications Workers of America and the American Federation of Teachers — feeding affiliate-level AI contract wins back into its international framework demands.

Key milestones

The campaign's primary legislative outcome is ILO Convention 193 — the Decent Work in the Platform Economy Convention, 2026 — adopted by the 114th International Labour Conference on 12 June 2026. It is the first legally binding international treaty governing the digital platform economy, and the first ILO instrument to address algorithmic management directly: platforms must disclose to workers and their representatives the automated monitoring and decision-making systems affecting access to work, pay, and termination. Convention 193 followed a 3 July 2025 ILC resolution committing the ILO to negotiate the Convention and Recommendation — itself a product of the ITUC's multi-year coordination of national federation lobbying at the ILO tripartite process.

In October 2025 the ITUC published "Artificial Intelligence: What are the implications for trade unions?" — a comprehensive report documenting AI's effects on job quality, algorithmic management, social protection, and fundamental labour rights, with a central call for binding regulation with worker participation in every process. General Secretary Luc Triangle launched it with the statement that "The rapid development and deployment of AI must be accompanied by sufficient regulation, with workers included in this process."