Albany’s sneaky AI law is a union scam — that – Latest News
New York City is staring down a $7.25 billion price range hole this coming fiscal yr — and the financial savings trumpeted by Mayor Zohran Mamdani, together with $100 million over two years in school-contract financial savings he bragged about final week, are barely a drop within the bucket.
Artificial intelligence presents a once-in-a-generation probability to spice up authorities productiveness, decreasing town’s prices.
Yet an obscure however important state law generally known as the LOADinG Act threatens that alternative.
The statute started in 2023 as an AI-transparency invoice for state companies, with the said goal of establishing accountability and transparency for AI use in authorities decision-making — a affordable and even worthwhile aim.
Three years and three rounds of amendments later, nevertheless, the LOADinG Act has advanced from a law to guard the public to at least one that protects authorities workers.
The accountability and transparency provisions had been principally eliminated.
In their place is a legislative ban on authorities companies utilizing AI to displace workers, cut their hours, cut back their pay or advantages, or switch “duties and functions currently performed” by a employee to an automated system.
In easy phrases, it ensures that no civil servant will lose a job, and even a single process, to AI.
These protections prolong to high school districts, SUNY, CUNY, and counties, cities, cities and villages — that is, almost each public employer within the state.
The law’s language covers “city” with out qualification: no population threshold or NYC carve-out, in contrast to different state legal guidelines.
So its protections, which had been prolonged to metropolis workers in February 2026, may have large price range implications for Gotham.
While the law doesn’t outright ban metropolis companies from utilizing AI, it successfully prohibits it the place it may most successfully reorganize forms away from the staffers who are actually doing it, making it unimaginable for managers to reassign and automate routine work like consumption, triage, first-pass drafting and doc review.
A legal regime that permits automation in idea however bans it in follow exists to guard incumbents, to not encourage adoption.
The law arms public-sector unions a statutory foundation for a grievance or an improper-practice charge at any time when an company’s AI use touches a unionized job.
The metropolis received a preview of its possible penalties in Nassau County final fall.
After the county district legal professional’s workplace sought to introduce automated systems to deal with case-input work, the Civil Service Employees Association filed a charge with the state’s Public Employment Relations Board.
The union disputed the new tech on the grounds that it cut into members’ time beyond regulation, resting its declare on the union’s contract and bizarre bargaining law relatively than on the LOADinG Act (which on the time didn’t but attain counties).
City companies could now face related disputes — however with a statutory ground behind them.
The law is a type of union job safety that applies mechanically, doesn’t rely upon what any contract says, and bars companies from shifting duties to AI even when no person’s job or pay is at stake.
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That’s as a result of the statute doesn’t outline its key phrases: No courtroom or company has interpreted what “displacement” means on this context, or “duties and functions currently performed,” and the law doesn’t say which instruments even depend as a coated AI system.
And the burden of guessing flawed will fall on the company, not on the union bringing the charge.
For metropolis attorneys, the secure (and predictable) guess is the broadest potential studying: keep away from automating something that touches a union job, not simply the makes use of that would really price somebody a place, hours or pay.
That type of warning will carry a big alternative price.
City companies can deploy AI for features no person at present performs — however risk-averse company leaders will depart untouched the routine, high-volume work that wastes a lot workers time.
They’ll confine automation to the margins, foreclosing the financial savings New York City wants most proper now and weakening the case for investing in AI in any respect.
Agencies will bear the associated fee of software program and coaching, however lack the liberty to reorganize the work that would pay for them.
Yet authorities exists to offer companies — to not guarantee the roles of the people who present them.
A statute that started as a query about whether or not New Yorkers may trust their authorities’s use of AI has turn into one that asks whether or not, in follow, authorities can use AI in any respect with out organized labor’s sign-off.
The LOADinG Act’s job protections expire in July 2028, until Albany renews them.
Before it does, City Hall and the Legislature owe New Yorkers a nearer have a look at what the law really protects — and who pays for it.
Sean Speer is a technical author at Manhattan Institute.
