Interest Area
Workforce
Our Thinking
Emerging technologies are fundamentally reshaping work and employment, often excluding workers and communities from their development and exacerbating longstanding inequalities and power imbalances. These technologies are redefining not only the nature of jobs, but also how workplace decisions are made, how workers are valued, and how organizations evolve. Yet, the pace of change has outstripped our understanding of its impacts on workers and their communities. Our support prioritizes worker-informed research, pilot programs, and field-building efforts that deepen understanding of how AI and emerging workplace technologies reshape job quality, worker agency, and power dynamics. This includes supporting upstream pilots that co-design or test technologies with workers in real-world contexts, as well as research that surfaces actionable evidence about the incentives, conditions, and policies that shape responsible adoption.
Portfolio Question: How might we ensure that workers shape how AI and emerging technologies transform work in ways that strengthen job quality, improve worker experience, and increase equitable opportunity?
Our Hypothesis: We believe AI and emerging technologies can reduce harms, improve worker experience, and strengthen job quality when investments support worker-informed research and pilots that reduce information asymmetries, center worker voice in design and deployment, and generate actionable evidence that can influence employers, investors, policymakers, and the broader workforce field.
Inquiry Area
Understanding and Shaping Workplace Technologies
We believe philanthropy has a critical role to play in building the evidence base and ensuring solutions are informed by those most impacted. By supporting worker-informed research, piloting responsible approaches, and convening diverse stakeholders, we aim to help shape a future in which technological progress strengthens human potential, expands opportunity, and benefits workers and the broader society. Across these efforts, we emphasize translating and disseminating insights to employers, technologists, policymakers, and funders, strengthening the connective tissue between research, practice, and decision-making to guide more equitable implementation and reduce power imbalances between employers and workers.
Sub-Portfolio Question: What conditions, incentives, and evidence are needed to shift the equitable and responsible design, development, and deployment of emerging technologies towards improved job quality and worker outcomes?
Highlighted Grantees
Washington Center for Equitable Growth
The Washington Center for Equitable Growth is a nonprofit research and grantmaking organization dedicated to advancing evidence-backed ideas and policies that promote strong, stable, and broad-based economic growth. Their fundamental purpose is to determine the channels through which rising economic inequality affects economic growth and stability in the United States.
Economic Policy Institute
The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) is a nonprofit, nonpartisan think tank working for the last 30 years to counter rising inequality, low wages and weak benefits for working people, slower economic growth, unacceptable employment conditions, and a widening racial wage gap. They intentionally center low- and middle-income working families in economic policy discussions at the federal, state, and local levels as they fight for a world where every worker has access to a good job with fair pay, affordable health care, retirement security, and a union.
AFL-CIO Tech Institute
The AFL-CIO Tech Institute works at the intersection of technological innovation in the workplace, centering worker knowledge, expertise, and interests in our modern innovation-based economy with the goal of ensuring that technological change creates widespread prosperity for all American workers. They work with a broad set of stakeholders, including unions and their members, universities, public officials, funders and employers to develop educational tools, policy analysis, and strategies to advance the needs and interests of working people in our rapidly shifting tech economy.
Workforce Insights
Big Ideas | Reflections
Rural Consultation Series: Rural Innovation Is Happening. Why Don’t We Hear More About It?
In our work—with grantees, through firsthand observation, and in the stories we intentionally seek—we’ve witnessed the power of technological innovation…
Big Ideas
For Rural Communities, AI Must Mean More Than Data Centers
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News | Reflections
The Quiet Work Shaping Tomorrow
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