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6/4/2026
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Senate OKs Sen. Gu bill limiting the use of electronic monitoring to make employment decisions
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The Senate today voted to approve legislation from Sen. Victoria Gu to ensure that important workplace decisions, including hiring, firing and compensation, are made with human oversight and are not based primarily on surveillance tools and algorithms.
“Businesses in Rhode Island are already using AI and electronic monitoring tools to surveil and discipline workers in a way no human supervisor could. If you’re making these consequential decisions overs workers’ lives, there needs to be disclosure, meaningful human oversight and an opportunity to make corrections, because we have seen real examples where workers are disciplined because of an algorithm error,” said Senator Gu (D-Dist. 38, Westerly, Charlestown, South Kingstown), who chairs the Senate Committee on Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technologies.
The bill (2026-S 2499A) would prohibit employers from relying primarily on data collected through electronic monitoring when making hiring, promotion, disciplinary and compensation decisions. To comply, employers would have to establish meaningful human oversight over all such decisions, verify the accuracy of collected data and incorporate additional information in the decision-making process, including evaluations, personnel files, employee work products and peer reviews.
Employers would also have to notify the impacted employee about which data was collected and the time interval it was collected, so that they have an opportunity to request corrections to errors.
The bill addresses the concern that electronic data, fed through AI tools or algorithms, could be making important decisions impacting workers without human oversight or consideration.
Indeed, AI is already playing a large role in who companies hire, promote and fire. A study from last year found that 65% of managers were using AI tools to make work-related decisions, despite only one-third of them having formal training on how to use the tools, raising concerns about whether those using the technology understand it and are using it fairly. In addition, inherent bias in the training data used by the AI models could lead to discriminatory and unjust outcomes when it comes to hirings, firing and promotions.
In response to these developments, several states, including Massachusetts, Maine, Vermont, California, Illinois and Washington have passed or are considering similar legislation.
“We are just at the beginning of the Artificial Intelligence revolution,” said Patrick Crowley, president of the Rhode Island AFL-CIO. “Rhode Island has a chance to be a national leader by creating some common-sense guardrails so workers do not get exploited by this new technology. Thank you to Senator Gu for her leadership on this critical legislation.”
For more information, contact:
Tristan Grau, Publicist
State House Room B20
Providence, RI 02903
401.222.4935
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