It’s in Your Contract: How CWA Members are Shaping AI Through the Power of a Union Contract

Advances in artificial intelligence may be moving fast, but CWA’s union contracts are moving faster.

While lawmakers debate and corporate executives experiment, CWA members are using the power of collective bargaining to write enforceable rules for how AI is implemented on the job. A union contract is a binding agreement, backed by our power to grieve, arbitrate, and enforce. That’s how CWA members are turning our AI principles into protections.

Across our union, CWA members are bargaining over the implementation and use of AI technologies. Through our CWA National Committee on AI, we are sharing contract language and bargaining strategies with staff and local leaders through our AI Bargaining Toolkit.

CWA members across the tech and video game industries are showing how collective bargaining gives workers the power to regulate artificial intelligence at some of the largest tech companies in the country.

Beginning with an historic contract for workers at Microsoft subsidiary ZeniMax, CWA negotiated a bilateral agreement with the tech giant that defines collective principles on the usage of artificial intelligence in the workplace, ensuring that new technologies work for the people, not the other way around. Union-represented workers at Microsoft have also established articles in their collective bargaining agreements that require the company to provide notice to the union when the implementation of AI technology impacts work performed by bargaining-unit employees.

Bargaining units with the NewsGuild-CWA have ratified 58 union contracts that include language covering the use of AI in newsrooms across the country. TNG-CWA journalists are negotiating for job protections but also upholding journalistic standards and protecting the public from AI-generated slop flooding the news.

AI protections in our union contracts have teeth. Members at POLITICO have already used newly bargained AI contract language to win a landmark arbitration case against POLITICO management over the company’s unilateral introduction of artificial intelligence tools that bypassed negotiated safeguards and undermined core journalistic standards. CWA members set the precedent that employers cannot use AI technology as an end-run around contractual obligations.

At Frontier Communications in California, a new three-year contract ratified late last year includes a structure for addressing the implementation of AI tools. Instead of unilateral decisions handed down from management, workers now have a seat at the table.

NABET-CWA members on the hit podcast “Snap Judgment” negotiated intellectual property rights for creative workers, including protections from transfers of their work to artificial intelligence models.

These victories reflect a simple truth: workers are the best people to shape how AI technologies are used. Through collective bargaining, CWA members are proving that AI’s impacts are not inevitable. With union contracts and worker power, we can shape new technologies to strengthen jobs, protect the public, and uphold the dignity of our work.

CWAers at Microsoft subsidiary ZeniMax are helping to shape AI policies in tech through an historic contract protecting video game workers.

NewsGuild-CWA members rallied against AI Slop in December 2025.

Frontier Communications members in California ratified a contract including AI provisions.

CWA has been an international leader among unions, sharing our experience in shaping AI guardrails.