International Trade Union Confederation

The International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) is the world's largest trade union federation, formed on 1 November 2006 at its inaugural congress in Vienna, Austria, through the merger of the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) and the World Confederation of Labour (WCL), along with trade union organisations previously without global affiliation. Headquartered in Brussels, the ITUC represents nearly 200 million workers through 346 affiliated organisations in 171 countries and territories (June 2025). Its central mandate is the worldwide promotion and defence of workers' rights and interests through international advocacy, standard-setting, and coordination of national union movements. General Secretary Luc Triangle has made AI governance a defining priority: under his leadership, the confederation has demanded that workers and their unions be at the centre of every AI regulatory process.

Founding and structure

The ITUC emerged from the Vienna congress of 1–3 November 2006, uniting the ICFTU — the predominant Cold War–era international labour body — with the WCL and a set of previously unaffiliated national federations. The merger created a single global voice for organised labour for the first time, ending the split that had divided the international trade union movement since the Cold War. The confederation operates through five regional structures: ITUC-Africa, ITUC-Asia Pacific, the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC), the Trade Union Confederation of the Americas (TUCA), and the Arab Trade Union Confederation. Its affiliates include national trade union centres — the top-level federations of each country — rather than individual unions directly; those centres in turn affiliate sector-level and enterprise-level unions. In the United States, the AFL-CIO and Change to Win are the ITUC affiliates; in the UK, the TUC; across the Global South, a wide array of national federations spanning every political tradition of organised labour.

AI and the future of work

In October 2025 the ITUC published "Artificial Intelligence: What are the implications for trade unions?" — a comprehensive report bringing together research on the effects of AI deployment on job quality and fundamental labour rights, with sections covering algorithmic management systems, public service delivery, social protection, the environment, and development. The report's central finding is that algorithmic systems are increasingly used to manage work schedules, pay, and even dismissals, often without transparency or accountability, and that unregulated AI deployment is accelerating job fragmentation and work intensification. Launching the report, General Secretary Luc Triangle stated: "The rapid development and deployment of AI must be accompanied by sufficient regulation, with workers included in this process." Evelyn Astor, ITUC director of economic and social policy, warned that without appropriate regulation, AI would deepen existing risks across working people's lives. The report calls for stronger enforcement of labour and anti-discrimination laws in the digital era and demands that all governments, employers, and international institutions ensure workers and their unions have a central role in shaping the AI-driven future of work.

The confederation's policy position distinguishes between two AI deployment contexts that require distinct collective bargaining approaches: the use of generative AI tools by workers to do their jobs (productivity augmentation), and the use of AI-based systems by employers to make hiring, performance evaluation, work allocation, and disciplinary decisions (algorithmic management). The ITUC treats the latter as the higher-urgency governance problem, given the documented opacity of automated systems that evaluate and dismiss workers without human review.

ILO platform work convention campaign

The ITUC's most consequential AI-governance victory is the adoption of the ILO Convention on platform work. The confederation coordinated national union federations across the Global South and North to press the ILO for binding international standards covering digital platform workers — a constituency of approximately 150 million people globally, whose working conditions are governed almost entirely by algorithmic systems with no collective bargaining access. On 3 July 2025, the International Labour Conference (ILC) adopted a resolution committing the ILO to adopt a Convention supplemented by a Recommendation on platform work following a second discussion in 2026. On 12 June 2026, the 114th ILC adopted ILO Convention 193 — the Decent Work in the Platform Economy Convention, 2026 — the first legally binding international treaty dedicated to regulating the digital platform economy and safeguarding platform workers' rights. Convention 193 explicitly entitles platform workers and their representatives to transparency about the use of automated systems and the extent to which those systems affect working conditions or access to work — a direct statutory constraint on algorithmic management in the platform sector.

International advocacy and intergovernmental engagement

At the Paris AI Action Summit in February 2025, the ITUC issued a statement that "trade union rights are key to technological transformation", demanding that AI governance frameworks at every level include enforceable worker participation rights rather than voluntary social dialogue commitments. The confederation has engaged the G20 on AI and future-of-work governance — under South Africa's G20 presidency in 2025, AI was a central theme and ITUC demands for worker inclusion and just transition commitments were reflected in Heads of State conclusions. Through the ILO's tripartite governance structure, the ITUC is the workers' group's coordinating body, bringing national affiliates' bargaining experiences — including sectoral AI agreements in Europe — into the global standard-setting process. The ILO's 2025 working paper on social dialogue on AI and algorithmic management documented collective agreement examples the ITUC and its affiliates had negotiated, including agreements with Just Eat/Takeaway in Europe and sectoral standards in Kazakhstan.

Posture in the movement

The ITUC occupies a distinctive position in the make-AI-good movement as the organisation that connects grassroots workers — gig workers, content moderators, factory workers, care workers, public employees — to international standard-setting bodies through the same affiliated infrastructure. While most AI-governance civil society organizations operate at the level of public advocacy or litigation, the ITUC's leverage is collective bargaining: its affiliates negotiate directly with employers over AI deployment terms in hundreds of thousands of workplaces. The Communications Workers of America and the American Federation of Teachers are among its US affiliates that have built explicit AI negotiating programs; their contract wins feed back into the ITUC's international framework demands. The confederation's theory of change is that worker rights inside AI-governed workplaces — the right to know what the system decides, the right to appeal, the right to human review — are the most durable form of AI accountability because they are enforceable in every workplace where a union contract exists.