A bipartisan pair of US Senators has introduced a bill that would require companies and government agencies to report AI-related layoffs, and it couldn’t come at a better time. October jobs data suggests AI is driving the largest wave of layoffs headed into the end of the year that we’ve seen since 2003.
Senators Josh Hawley (R-MO) and Mark Warner (D-VA) on Wednesday announced plans to introduce the AI-Related Job Impacts Clarity Act. If passed, the law requires public companies and pretty much every single federal government agency to hand quarterly layoff data over to the Department of Labor, indicating how many jobs they cut due to automation.
The act would also require employers to report on a quarterly basis how many people they hired related to AI and automation, how many jobs they decided not to fill thanks to AI, and numbers on retraining due to artificial intelligence. The end goal, said Warner, is to help Congress understand how the labor market is changing and how to prepare for the future.
I’d be much more interested to see them forced to report how many of these jobs are being outsourced and concrete stats on what products or AI tools are actually replacing jobs.
A lot of these companies that are invested in AI, are saying that AI is the reason for layoffs, yet it seems like they’re not pointing to statistics or actual products that are replacing people yet. Their language seems to imply the layoffs are them hedging their bets for the coming tide, that will be any day now… trust us.