E&W Blog

America’s workers deserve the highest standard of safety on the job. Today, the Subcommittee on Workforce Protections held a hearing to examine how advanced and emerging technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) are improving efforts to keep America’s workers safe and healthy. 

Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-WI) started the hearing by highlighting how America needs policies that allow for greater flexibility so employers can tailor safety practices to fit their workers’ needs. "As we have heard throughout this Committee’s series of AI hearings, effective policy must strike a careful balance between considering these questions without stifling innovation and compromising our nation’s technological competitiveness. In the context of AI systems designed to protect workers on jobsites, there is no margin for error, and one oversight can be the difference between life and death,” he said. 

Mr. Jeff Buczkiewicz, President and CEO of the Mason Contractors Association of America, told Chairman Tim Walberg (R-MI) about how labor-intensive jobs are using AI to protect the long-term health of workers. “One such technology that has been created is something called ‘the mule’ and it’s a work assist apparatus that actually attaches to the scaffold and will help you with heavier block and heavier stone and will take a lot of that weight and heavier lifting away.” Mr. Buczkiewicz explained. 

AI is helping prolong careers, not taking jobs away.

Subcommittee Chairman Ryan Mackenzie (R-PA) asked Mr. Johan Land, Senior Vice President of Product and Engineering, Safety and AI at Samsara, how these technologies are moving workplace safety from a reactive, incident-based approach to a preventive, data-driven model. “We install cameras in the vehicles…[they] record what is happening…to identify unsafe situations to help the driver. This could be too close following distance or the driver [is] about to fall asleep and we wake them up. This saves lives on an unparalleled basis…We analyze this data also…to spot patterns—an example of that would be spotting continuous drowsiness,” Mr. Land explained.

Mr. Eric Hoplin, President and CEO of the National Association of Wholesaler-Distributors, explained to Rep. Randy Fine (R-FL) how too much government regulation can hinder implementation of new technologies like AI.“Eighty percent of the industry are small businesses—they have 20 employees or less. So they only have so [many] resources that they can deploy to new technology…As there is a patchwork of regulations, it increases the barrier to entry…[and] reduces innovation,” Mr. Hoplin said.

Bottom line: Committee Republicans are working to understand how advanced and emerging technologies can be used to address workplace safety.