Katie Tibaldi, a Writers Guild of America East captain and co-founder of the grassroots group @WGAStrikeUnite,  was one of the leading figures in the 148 day Writers Guild of America strike in Hollywood in 2023. The strike secured critical protections against artificial intelligence for screenwriters, a victory whose implications extend far beyond Hollywood. Under the new contract, writers can only be recognised as human authors, and studios are barred from using generative AI to replace them. Reflecting on the struggle, Tibaldi highlighted two decisive factors. First, the power of labour movements that combine formal union structures with grassroots organising, creating deep accountability and solidarity. Second, the need to shape public narratives around worker struggles, securing public support and building momentum for the fight. According to Tibaldi, storytelling is a vital tool: it humanises workers’ struggles and connects them to wider publics. Foregrounding the human costs of technology, she asserted her campaign line: ‘AI will never be your kid’s friend.’

The history of cultural labour in North America provides the foundation for these contemporary struggles. From the 1930s and 1940s onwards, screenwriters and radio and television workers organised extensively, forming unions such as the Association of Canadian Radio Artists, and the Screen Writers Guild in the United States, which addressed compensation and working conditions. These early victories created collective memory, union infrastructures, and legal frameworks that continue to shape labour struggles over technological change, including AI. As Neal McDougall of the Writers Guild of Canada, which represents more than 2,500 professional English-language screenwriters, emphasised, this history is crucial. It has enabled guilds not only to engage in collective bargaining but also to undertake sustained and expansive public policy work. This includes urging governments to support bargaining processes while also opposing policies that would undermine the collective decisions workers make at the negotiating table. Such efforts by unions mobilise legal and policy expertise, framing labour struggles in ways that align with the institutional logics and regulatory frameworks legible to policymakers.

Contemporary, inspiring examples of worker organising are now emerging in game studios as well. Simon Prefontaine, a game designer at Bethesda Game Studios in Montreal (acquired by Microsoft in 2021), described how fears around AI were a central factor in the studio’s unionisation with the Communication Workers of America in 2023. Workers across four offices, including Montreal and the United States, organised collectively to secure not only better pay and conditions, but also agreements on the ethical use of AI, ensuring it augments rather than replaces human labour. The process highlighted the challenges of cross-border organising, from navigating differing labour laws to overcoming company resistance. By leveraging “Return to Office” mandates for in-person coordination, turning the drive for card-signers into a friendly competition between offices, and using online platforms and member education to mobilise workers, the union built strong internal cohesion. Prefontaine emphasised that their unionisation  has transformed workplaces into spaces where workers actively shape how technology is deployed, showing that collective action can mitigate the threats posed by AI while establishing broader precedents for labour rights in the tech sector.

Beyond the cultural industries, AI adoption is recognised by traditional trade unions, such as the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE), as a looming threat to employment protections. Declan Ingham noted that AI should not be seen as a wholly new challenge, but as part of a centuries-long struggle over technology, tracing back to the looms of Middle England. In Canada, legislative frameworks and collective agreements have long been shaped by technological change and economic conflict—from railway unions navigating the transition from steam to diesel in the 1970s to the modern workplace.

Many existing protections, including layoff procedures, job security, retraining, reskilling, and bumping rights, can be leveraged to address AI-related concerns. Unions are building awareness through bargaining guides on technology adoption, helping workers identify when companies introduce new software or AI systems, even if these are not explicitly recognised as technological change, and understand how existing protections can be applied. There remains a pressing need to integrate long-term technology risks into bargaining agendas. However, this work is difficult, as immediate economic pressures, such as wages, often push future-focused issues to the bottom of the collective bargaining agenda.

Worker organising around AI is also emerging beyond the highly institutionalised union contexts of North America. In 2022, a group of creative professionals from Latin America and Spain formed the non-profit collective Arte es Ética, bringing together illustrators, graphic designers, and other visual creators to confront the impact of generative AI on the creative sector. The collective focuses on the threats AI poses to artists’ intellectual property rights and creative innovation, and broader social and environmental consequences, such as the strain that data centre deployment in Mexico places on local communities. Axel Gonzalez of Arte es Ética noted that even one data centre in Colón, Mexico, consumes nearly 20% of the town’s water, and posed provocations on the geographical asymmetry of such facilities, where communities at margins disproportionately bear the costs.

Arte es Ética educates the public about companies like Stability AI, OpenAI, and Midjourney, whose commercial generative AI was developed outside legal frameworks, remains unregulated, and is promoted not as a creative tool but as a means to replace human creators. They pressurise policymakers, and, most importantly, demands the enforcement of existing laws against ecological, labour and data extraction while also advocating for new protections. The group’s work also echoes the concern raised by Roseli Figaro, a professor at the University of São Paulo, around “sensitive materialities”. This concept means the human labour, know-how, and embodied practices through which workers interact with their environment and society, informing struggles to prevent the dispossession of the value they create.

Juan Manuel Ottaviano, an Argentinian researcher and union advisor, notes that unions excel at analysing technological change but often achieve less in terms of worker empowerment. He proposes concrete measures for collective bargaining: developing fair productivity metrics, guaranteeing rights to limit off-hours connectivity, implementing human-in-the-loop accountability mechanisms, creating joint committees on health, safety, and technology, and expanding workers’ computational capacity. He also advocates for cooperative technology organisation, data sovereignty in the Majority World, and treating digital infrastructure as a public good. Ottaviano also warns that the “end of work” debate is often used by corporations as an excuse to discipline workers and justify layoffs. For example, he points to massive layoffs at a global corporation in Argentina and at a big bank in Brazil, where AI was publicly invoked as justification for job cuts.

Digital solidarity economies form another critical highlight in the workers’ struggle over digital economies. These frameworks represent a shift from extractive logic of platform capitalism toward the bottom-up governance of technology, drawing on alternative economic traditions in which solidarity, democratic governance, equity, and shared ownership are central.  As Professor Rafael Grohmann argues, this field is characterised by plural forms of organisation, collectives and institutional arrangements that reflect the temperament of lived realities in the Majority World, as evidenced in Latin America.

A notable example of digital solidarity economies in action is the Homeless Workers’ Movement (MTST) in Brazil, which asserts internet access and connectivity as a fundamental right. Through initiatives developed by the Tech Sector of the MTST, including large-scale Wi-Fi mesh networks and digital literacy programmes, it advances lessons in digital sovereignty and demonstrates how social movements can integrate technology into broader struggles for rights and empowerment. Building on this, MTST has launched the Hire Those Who Struggle initiative, a WhatsApp-based chatbot that connects people seeking services with workers from the movement, which facilitated over 2,000 jobs in the metropolitan region of São Paulo alone, especially construction workers  and domestic workers, showing how digital tools can be mobilised to generate economic opportunities while strengthening collective organisation. In much of the Majority World, as Gabriel Simeone of MTST highlighted, marginalised communities do not simply wait for the State to act. They actively build popular power through initiatives built by workers that advance digital sovereignty while also advancing struggles for rights-based social citizenship.

Similar examples of workers’ governing technology also includes, platform cooperatives with explicit commitment to social movements, such as Alternativa Laboral Trans, a tech co-op composed entirely of trans people. They design and build digital tools primarily for NGOs and social movements across Latin America and the Majority World, approaching technology not through an investor’s logic but guided by workers’ values, collective decision-making, and social needs. Luca Zuñiga Brenes emphasises that their goal is not profit maximisation but sustainable processes that prioritise well-being and mental health. This approach is not just about surviving in the economy; it is an experiment in a human-centred, sustainable model of technology, where every decision, including the use of AI, reflects their values and commitment to the community. Similarly, Cecilia Munoz Cancela of the Argentine Federation of Tech Co-ops (FACTTIC) asks, “Do we want to work eight, ten hours a day? Please, these jobs sustain our lives!” Such initiatives demonstrate how cooperative models can reimagine economic activity, reinforce digital sovereignty, and integrate technology governance with social and environmental justice.

Digital solidarity economies are not merely technical innovations; they are, as Ricard Espelt, an associate professor at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, notes, political experiments in building democracy. While they serve as sites of experimentation and struggle, this path is not without challenges. As Lucas Milanez of the University of São Paulo reminds us, workers’ governance of technologies through digital solidarity economies is not without contradictions. There are limitations, and the aim is not simply to compete directly with Big Tech. Rather, it is to encourage the development of public policies and collective popular initiatives that operate under principles of self-management and internal democracy, promote decent work, ensure ownership of data and software infrastructure, address inequalities, and foster local economies.

Furthermore, universities and institutional partnerships can further strengthen these initiatives. Campaigns like Hire a Co-op at the University of Toronto, which encourage universities to contract with cooperatives, show how institutional support can reinforce worker-led alternatives and social solidarity.

As the workshop Workers Governing Technologies: Collective Strategies Across Contexts shows, technology may change, but worker organising, and worker organisation, in its plural forms, remains central to shaping the future of labour, defending rights, and building a more equitable and democratic world across geographies. Guided by values such as intercooperation, digital sovereignty, autonomy, and inclusion, workers are actively determining how technologies are developed, deployed, and governed.