This article originally appeared in The Detroit News July 21, 2026.

The next major labor dispute in Michigan won’t be over safety or wages. It will be about whether state and local governments need union permission before using artificial intelligence.

On May 13, the Michigan Civil Service Commission formed a task force to review its contracting practices. Although the resolution does not mention AI, union leaders reportedly immediately argued to include it in the conversation.

“When an AI system performs work that would otherwise be done by a classified employee, that is subcontracting,” said Joseph Bellgowan, a labor relations specialist with SEIU Local 517M. Bellgowan argued that AI should be subject to contracting rules, and he called on the task force to evaluate its usage by state departments.

The Michigan Civil Service Commission is a little-known but powerful body. It oversees rules and working conditions for about 50,000 state employees in agencies such as corrections, health and human services and transportation. The Commission negotiates collective bargaining agreements with several employee unions and manages the rules for when agencies can outsource a task instead of using government personnel.

State personnel director John Gnodtke will chair the new contracting task force. Each union will appoint a member to the task force, and the Office of the State Employer (which negotiates with the unions) will pick five participants. The task force will summarize the history of state contracting, assess its benefits and tradeoffs and recommend improvements to the regulations.

State and local governments, like many employers, are experimenting with artificial intelligence to see if it improves efficiency. If a government embraces AI, goes the thinking, it could reduce the number of public employees needed for a particular agency or task. It’s unclear, however, whether agencies would actually be decimated as feared.

Nevertheless, unions across the country are raising alarms about how artificial intelligence could affect the public workforce. Washington state lawmakers are considering a bill requiring state and local governments to bargain over AI adoption. The American Federation of Teachers published a report in August 2025 recommending that unions negotiate over a host of AI-related issues.

“Without strong labor protections and union involvement in decision-making,” said the report, “AI can become a tool for cost-cutting at the expense of jobs, wages and working conditions.”

We’ve seen this movie before. The debate over artificial intelligence echoes an earlier technological innovation — the standardized shipping container. Prior to the 1950s, shipping was slow, laborious and expensive. Longshoremen at major U.S. ports unloaded cargo crate by crate, box by box and item by item. Around that time Malcom McLean, who owned a major trucking company, championed the idea of a standardized container that could be loaded on a ship, stacked with identical containers, and then moved by crane to a train or truck.

Over the next two decades McLean’s innovation revolutionized shipping, manufacturing and retail worldwide. Cargo that once took weeks to unload now takes hours, and shipping costs plummeted. But, writes Marc Levinson in his book “The Box,” it roiled labor tensions at ports across the country, especially with the International Longshoremen’s Association and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, who saw the container as a job-killer. Unions resisted adoption of standardized containers, but the innovation eventually prevailed because it served consumers and the economy.

Policymakers should not judge technology by whether it preserves existing government jobs. If technology helps the state provide better services at lower costs, union demands should not stand in the way.

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