Coalition of Digital Employees – Artificial Intelligence (CODE-AI)

The Coalition of Digital Employees – Artificial Intelligence — known as CODE-AI or Code AI — is the Philippine national multi-sector labour coalition launched on 25 January 2025 in Quezon City to organise digital workers against the deployment of artificial intelligence as an instrument of intensified workplace surveillance, productivity extraction, and threatened mass displacement, and to push the Philippine Congress for labour-rights and free-speech protections inside the country's pending AI Regulation Act. The coalition is anchored by the BPO Industry Employees Network (BIEN) — the country's principal civil-society organisation for business-process-outsourcing workers, founded by Lean Porquia — and brings together six other organisations spanning the delivery, telecommunications, IT, and labour-education sectors. CODE-AI is the corpus's first Philippine labour-organising anchor, the first explicit AI-displacement worker coalition documented in the Global South's largest BPO economy, and the first Southeast-Asian labour formation organised against the algorithmic-management and surveillance practices that AI-co-pilot, sentiment-analysis, and speech-analysis tooling have introduced into call-centre work.

Formation and coalition composition

CODE-AI was launched at a 25 January 2025 briefing in Quezon City attended by member organisations representing the business-process-outsourcing, delivery, telecommunications, and information-technology sectors. The seven founding member organisations are:

• BPO Industry Employees Network (BIEN) — the country's principal civil-society organisation for business-process-outsourcing workers, with approximately 4,000 members, founded by Lean Porquia, who serves as CODE-AI's convenor.
• Riders Watch — the platform-delivery-workers' organisation tracking working conditions and algorithmic-management practices on food-delivery and ride-hail platforms.
• Gabay sa Unyon sa Telekomunikasyon Supervisors-PLDT (GUTS-PLDT) — a supervisors' union at the Philippine Long Distance Telephone Company.
• Digital Justice — a digital-rights and tech-worker-organising formation focused on platform-economy labour rights.
• Computer Professionals Union (CPU) — the IT-and-software-professionals union representing technology workers in the Philippines.
• May Day Multimedia — the labour-movement multimedia-production organisation that produces video, broadcast, and online content for the broader Philippine labour-rights movement.
• Ecumenical Institute for Labor Education and Research (EILER) — the labour-education-and-research institution providing analytical support and worker-education programming.

The coalition is convened by Lean Porquia, head of research at BIEN and the BIEN founder. CODE-AI's spokesperson is Renso Bajala, the former Concentrix customer-service trainee whose termination after the November 2024 Rest of World exposé became the coalition's anchor case; additional named launch participants include Vilma Estrellado, a BPO worker terminated on redundancy grounds; Ivan Ilagan, a telecommunication union officer; and Bane Vicente, a platform-workers researcher.

Catalyst: the Rest of World exposé and Bajala's termination

CODE-AI's formation was directly catalysed by Michael Beltran's 26 November 2024 Rest of World investigation into AI deployment across Philippine call centres, which reported from Manila on the rapid integration of AI co-pilots, sentiment-analysis programmes, and speech-analysis software into the country's 1.84-million-worker BPO sector — the largest BPO economy in the Global South. The article detailed the Concentrix Corporation deployment of sentiment-analysis tooling that scores agents in real time on tone, pitch, mood, positive language use, interruptions, hold times, and issue-resolution speed; an AI co-pilot pulling customer information and offering real-time suggestions; and a doubling of call volumes (Bajala disclosed that the AI monitoring increased his throughput from approximately 30 calls per 8-hour shift to that figure before lunch). The Accenture work documented in the same article showed trust-and-safety analysts cross-checking AI-generated Meta photo-recognition and Instagram-reel content with reduced per-prompt time allocations (200 seconds cut to 170 seconds in October 2024).

Concentrix terminated Bajala shortly after publication for noncompliance with the company's "code of discipline and ethics" — a dismissal CODE-AI's founding statement framed as retaliation for speaking publicly about AI workplace conditions and as a code-of-silence chilling effect the coalition exists to break. Bajala's quoted framing — "Workers shall not be muted. We exercise our free speech and association, as our participation in discussions and policy-making is crucial" — anchors the coalition's free-speech-at-work demand alongside the displacement and wage demands.

Policy engagement: the AI Regulation Act and the congressional working group

CODE-AI's principal policy vector is participation in the congressional labour committee technical working group on the Artificial Intelligence Regulation Act — House Bill 7913 and 7983, filed by Rep. Keith Micah Tan in the 19th Congress as the country's flagship AI-governance legislation. Porquia's policy framing at the launch — "We call on the government for a proactive and inclusive policy-making, as workers face threats of job losses, diminishing wages, and other harms" — frames CODE-AI's role as adding the worker-rights voice to a legislative process the coalition reads as having previously been led by industry and regulators without organised labour representation. The coalition's explicit demands at launch span four lines: justice for Bajala and his reinstatement at Concentrix; documented coalition-led research into AI harms in the Philippine workplace; corporate-employer accountability for surveillance, displacement, and wage suppression flowing from AI deployment; and free-speech protections enabling workers to discuss AI's labour impact publicly.

The coalition's industrial framing is grounded in the Avasant industry estimate that 300,000 BPO jobs in the Philippines could be lost in the next five years to AI displacement against 100,000 new roles created — a net loss of 200,000 positions in an economy where the BPO sector contributes roughly US$38 billion in annual revenue and employs nearly two million workers. The IMF Working Paper WP/25/043 on the Philippine labour market published in 2025 locates BPO and call-centre occupations in the high-exposure, low-complementarity quadrant that carries the strongest displacement risk under current generative-AI capability frontiers; the 25 February 2025 BusinessWorld piece drawing on the IMF analysis is the public-facing corroboration of CODE-AI's threat-modelling. The coalition also planned a 22 February 2025 town hall in Manila for digital workers facing AI in the workplace as a primary post-launch mobilisation event.

Sustained mobilisation and the BIEN public-action register

CODE-AI's lead organisation, BIEN, has continued to anchor a broader BPO-worker public-mobilisation register through 2025. The 27 July 2025 Sobwa 2025 ("State of BPO Address") protest action, held the day before President Marcos Jr.'s fourth State of the Nation Address, called for a P36,000 BPO entry-level salary, the immediate passage of a P1,200 nationwide living-wage measure, disaster-protection measures, and AI regulation — confirming AI regulation as one of four standing BIEN public-mobilisation demands six months after the CODE-AI launch, alongside the longer-running wage-and-protection lines that predate the AI strand. The CODE-AI coalition operates in this combined register: a multi-sector coalition vehicle for the AI-and-labour policy line, with BIEN remaining the BPO-anchored organisational base that carries the broader sectoral demands the coalition exists alongside.

Place in the movement

CODE-AI is the corpus's first Philippine labour-organising anchor and the first Southeast-Asian formation organised explicitly around AI as a workplace and labour-rights issue. It joins a small set of in-corpus labour-side organisations whose work intersects with AI deployment: the Writers Guild of America and SAG-AFTRA, the US creative-industries unions that won AI provisions in their 2023 strikes and master bargaining agreements; the Concept Art Association, the US illustration-industry advocacy group on generative-AI training and labour; and the African Content Moderators Union, the Nairobi-headquartered union of African content moderators working on the AI supply chain. CODE-AI's anchor in the BPO and call-centre sector — the largest single AI-exposed worker category in the Global South — and its multi-sector coalitional form (BPO, delivery, telecoms, IT, labour-education) make it structurally distinct from those formations: a national multi-sector labour vehicle rather than a single-industry union, and the first labour anchor outside the US-and-Africa axis that has dominated the corpus's existing AI-and-labour coverage.

Inside the Philippine civil-society field, CODE-AI sits alongside but operationally distinct from the country's digital-rights organisations — the Foundation for Media Alternatives, the Quezon City-anchored civil-society digital-rights organisation that produces the annual Digital Rights Report on AI's impact on basic freedoms, and EngageMedia, the regional Asia-Pacific digital-rights organisation operating in the Philippines as part of the APC network. The two digital-rights organisations carry the Philippine voice on AI into the privacy, gender-and-ICT, internet-rights, and platform-accountability registers FMA's Digital Rights Report and EngageMedia's DRAPAC convenings cover; CODE-AI carries the Philippine voice on AI into the labour-rights, displacement, surveillance-at-work, and free-speech-at-work registers organised labour can speak to and the digital-rights organisations cannot. The Philippine national policy conversation on AI runs through both vectors — CODE-AI in the congressional labour-committee technical working group on the AI Regulation Act, FMA's Digital Rights Report tracking the parallel regulatory work at the Supreme Court, the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas, and the Department of Education — and CODE-AI is the corpus's anchor on the labour-organising half of that two-track Philippine response.