In Oxford Handbook on AI Governance: The Role of Workers in AI Ethics and Governance

Workers are crucial but overlooked stakeholders in AI governance: While governments, corporations, and international organizations dominate AI governance discussions, workers who build and deploy these systems play a vital role in identifying and mitigating harms that technical reliability alone cannot prevent.

AI harms stem from normative uncertainty, not just technical failures: The paper distinguishes between technical negligence and harms arising from unclear societal values around safety and fairness in complex systems—a distinction that suggests technical fixes alone are insufficient for responsible AI development.

Workers use three key arguments to claim a voice in AI governance: Employees leverage claims based on their subjection to AI systems, control over their labor's products, and their proximity to how these systems actually function in practice—positioning them as uniquely informed stakeholders.

Lack of consensus on harm identification has sparked worker activism: Because the AI ethics community agrees harms should be reduced but disagrees on how to identify and address them, workers have increasingly organized collectively to protest how their workplaces handle these decisions.

Harm reporting processes require structured mechanisms: The paper proposes a three-step model (identification, governance decision, and response) that suggests responsible AI governance needs formal processes for workers to report concerns, not just voluntary ethics guidelines.