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Former Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo and a bipartisan group of governors have just launched with a who’s‑who of major employers and AI firms. It’s billed as “America’s people strategy for the AI economy,” with hundreds of millions of dollars aimed at reskilling workers, modernizing state workforce systems, and smoothing the path from disappearing jobs to new ones. In a political culture that too often tells workers to adapt or be left behind, it is a good sign that these power players are concerned about how AI will impact workers.

But RAISE US is also a missed opportunity to really center the working people and communities who will bear the brunt of AI’s disruptions. Right now, the basic architecture of the AI economy is being built in ways that make worker displacement and deskilling the path of least resistance for AI developers and deployers. And workers and the public have almost no standing (formal rights to participate, vote, challenge decisions, or set terms) in the public institutions that support AI’s buildout or any real ability to regulate the private firms doing the building. This absence of standing is neither a coincidence nor a natural occurrence.

Democratic societies owe people and communities (who are also taxpayers and voters) more than help on the backend of technological change. We have lived through waves of economic restructuring, most recently deindustrialization in the 1980s and 1990s, when policy and tech-enabled offshoring hollowed out manufacturing communities and left entire regions of our country in shambles. The dominant policy response to these shifts was to accept plant closures as inevitable and invest in retraining. Displaced workers were told that with new skills, they would find their place in the new economy.

We are still living with the results of that failed policy response. The shows that many older, higher‑paid workers were pushed into direct competition with lower‑paid workers, wages cascaded downward, participation fell, and the communities left behind have never fully recovered. The were too thin, too short, and too detached from any real power over the forces driving the transition. The politics of our current moment are, in no small part, the price we are all paying for the choices our leaders made two generations ago. 

But we have faced wrenching industrial change before and chosen to do more than soften its blows. In the wake of the original Gilded Age, Progressive‑Era reforms created antitrust and that gave the public new standing to push back against concentrated corporate power in the marketplace. The New Deal then gave many () workers a legally protected voice, real standing, in setting the terms of work through, turning workplace governance into something workers could share rather than simply endure. Even in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, the creation of the gave households a new institutional foothold in policing abuses in the financial system.

This is also why the fight over our public institutions is so critical at this moment. Recent expanding presidential control over once‑independent commissions are not just abstract constitutional debates; they are steps toward unraveling the very infrastructure that gives the public any standing at all in markets and regulatory systems. The critical work ahead requires defending, rebuilding, and redesigning these institutions so they are capable of constraining powerful economic actors and responding to the logic of today’s data‑driven, digital economy.

To its credit, RAISE US starts from an honest diagnosis of where we are. Gina Raimondo has that America has a technology strategy for AI but “doesn’t yet have a people strategy,” and that our 20th‑century mix of unemployment insurance, four‑year college, and ad‑hoc retraining is not built for the speed and scale of the disruption ahead. RAISE US promises stronger safety nets, better training pathways, and closer coordination among states, employers, and philanthropy. These types of shock‑absorbing policies and programs are necessary, and updating them, and the institutions that provide them, is critical work that should be done in close partnership with states.

The problem is that RAISE US positions itself as a “people strategy” but does not give working people, or the organizations that represent them, a real seat at the decisionmaking table. It treats workers more like aid recipients in big tech’s AI transition. 

The key question is whether we learn from deindustrialization and treat this moment as a chance to reimagine the economy: to build, and in some cases rebuild, institutions that center working people and communities, can respond at scale to AI disruption, and actually rebuild economic stability for working people. Retraining and safety‑net programs alone

AI’s trajectory has been, and continues to be, in competition policy, taxation, procurement, data‑governance practices, economic development, and public investments in research and development. In nearly all of those venues, large firms hold recognized standing, resources, and procedural power. Workers and communities sometimes hold advisory or consultative roles. Parity is rare. And that’s a real problem.

It’s why so many well‑intentioned programs end up repeating the same pattern. They treat technology development as an inevitable force that workers must adapt to or lose out. They focus only on cushioning the blow for workers or communities after the fact. In this way, workers and communities are treated as variables to be managed, not as stakeholders with critical knowledge and important, legitimate interests.

We should expect more from efforts like RAISE US: to move from models that treat working people as beneficiaries to models that recognize worker organizations, professional associations, and community organizations as co-governors of initiatives tasked with designing our policy responses to tech-driven labor market disruption. When workers are treated primarily as recipients of training and support, the underlying dynamics of the transition remain untouched. When they have standing and power, the transition itself could truly raise the floor for all of us. 

What could these types of shifts look like in practice?

First, give workers and communities real seats in governance. In any initiative that claims to be a “people strategy,” worker organizations, professional associations, and community organizations should hold defined positions, with voting power, not just advisory roles, in the national and state bodies that set priorities, approve pilots, and translate pilots into policy. Consultation is not the same as standing. The people whose lives are being reorganized by AI should be principals in the institutions deciding how that reorganization happens.

Second, pair transition supports with guardrails and protections. A worker‑centered AI strategy can’t just offer to pick up the pieces after jobs are automated away; it has to take a position on which uses of AI are acceptable at work in the first place. Corporate partners should commit, as a condition of participation, to concrete limits on harmful uses of AI, systems that target union activity, fully automated discipline, pervasive surveillance, and to processes that recognize and strengthen workers’ bargaining power over new deployments. If an initiative is “overhauling public workforce systems,” it should also take on a responsibility to help define the floor for how AI tools should and shouldn’t be used. 

Third, treat pilots as prototypes to foster new partnerships among workers, communities, government, and business, not just new training programs. Pilots should be designed to test ways of empowering workers and communities in the venues that are already shaping the AI economy: procurement boards that decide which tools public agencies buy and how they are monitored, data‑governance bodies that oversee how worker and community data are collected and used, and sectoral councils that set standards across an industry. Done well, those experiments can generate model laws and institutions that states later codify and scale.

“Anything about me without me isn’t for me” is a simple way of describing a principle that runs through democratic practice, from disability rights to labor to voting rights. AI policy is no exception. Initiatives like RAISE US can and should help workers navigate change. But in an economy where AI is increasingly the architecture of that change, the measure of a true people strategy is not only how generous its supports are. It is whether the people it is meant to serve have a rightful role in steering the systems that will govern their working lives.