Britain’s biggest trade union group warns the U.K. is losing a “race against time” to regulate AI before firms use the technology to make biased hires based on facial recognition and tone of voice.
The Trades Union Congress (TUC), which represents 48 workers’ unions making up 5.5 million members, published a “ready-to-go” bill Friday that seeks to stop employers from using AI to hire, manage, and fire staff.
The pace of change in AI means U.K. law is simply failing to keep pace with how firms could be adopting the technology to streamline their HR processes, to the detriment of workers, the TUC assistant general secretary Kate Bell.
“Other countries are regulating workplace AI – so that staff and employers know where they stand. The UK can’t afford to drag its feet and become an international outlier,” she said.
The TUC set up an AI task force months ago to drive its research, which included the Alan Turing Institute and the Institute for the Future of Work.
The union group and YouGov surveyed more than 2,300 U.K. adults, finding seven out of 10 people thought workers should be consulted before a firm introduces AI in the workplace.
Despite this, firms have typically pressed ahead with implementing AI to manage staff.
Indeed, one of the early major use cases for AI has been in human resources (HR).
IBM has heralded the benefits of AI in HR, which it says include payroll processing, employee records management, and benefits administration in addition to hiring and firing.
Last year, IBM CEO Arvind Krishna wrote in Fortune that the company had been able to reduce the number of staff working on relatively menial HR tasks from 700 to 50 with the help of AI.
Workers fighting back against AI
While bosses are enthusiastic about streamlining management costs and potentially finding more suitable candidates, the workers they’re seeking to hire, manage, and fire are far from convinced.
The research from TUC and YouGov found 77% opposed the use of AI to make hiring decisions, while 86% were against the use of the technology to make firing decisions.
“Workers already face the effects of AI systems through increased surveillance, biased hiring systems and shoddy management algorithms. And this Bill would prevent pseudo-science emotion recognition systems from being used in workplaces,” said Gina Neff, executive director of the Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy at the University of Cambridge.
Euan Blair’s apprenticeship unicorn Multiverse acquired Searchlight, which uses a unique AI loop to improve employers’ hiring success while aiming to reduce biases that can crop up in the recruitment process.
Still, workers carry serious reservations about the use of AI in the hiring process, and companies that implement it may be waving goodbye to the best talent.A survey published last year by Pew Research Center found two-thirds of Americans wouldn’t apply for a job where AI was used as part of the hiring process.
