WEI and MiRS Lecture 2025 with Professor Virginia Doellgast

Building worker voice and power in AI decisions: Three cases in the German ICT industry

Virginia Doellgast (Cornell University, USA), Tobias Kämpf (University of Labour, Germany), Barbara Langes (Institute for Social Science Research, Germany)

Abstract

This paper compares works council initiatives to influence the adoption and deployment of AI-based tools in three German Information and Communications Technology (ICT) companies, with the aim of investigating the conditions for workers to establish collective voice in these decisions. In all three case studies, works councils strengthened worker voice in decisions concerning the use of management-automating AI technologies in areas such as performance monitoring and workforce analytics. However, they faced more challenges in encouraging alternative approaches to skill development and employment restructuring associated with work-automating AI. Institutional and discursive power resources help to explain both their overall success in strengthening voice and different outcomes across AI applications.

Speaker Bio

Virginia Doellgast is the Anne Evans Estabrook Professor of Employment Relations and Dispute Resolution in the ILR School at Cornell University. Her research focuses on the comparative political economy of labor markets and labor unions, inequality, precarity, and democracy at work. She is currently studying the impact of digitalization and AI on job quality in in the ICT services and game development industries, based on comparative research in North America and Europe. Past research projects have compared labor union responses to restructuring and employer collective action in the telecommunications sector; and worker voice and well-being in call centers.