“A.I. Is The New NAFTA”

by Mona Mahadevan

Connecticut AFL-CIO President Ed Hawthorne: If you believe that tech CEOs go out of their way to protect workers from A.I., “I have a bridge I would like to sell to you.”

Public Citizen’s Melinda St. Louis: Offshoring has “decimated” communities across the Midwest.

A U.S. representative from Wisconsin, the top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, and the president of the Connecticut AFL-CIO walked into a Fair Haven factory building. They left with the conviction that workers need protections to prevent artificial intelligence (A.I.) from taking their jobs.

“A.I. is the new NAFTA [North American Free Trade Agreement],” warned Ed Hawthorne, the Connecticut chapter president of the AFL-CIO. (The U.S. Department of Labor estimates that at least one million Americans lost their jobs as a result of the 1994 U.S.-Mexico-Canada free-trade agreement.)

Hawthorne offered that take Monday afternoon during a roundtable discussion about trade policy with New Haven U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro and Wisconsin U.S. Rep. Mark Pocan, among other political-labor powerhouses, at 20 Mill St.

That Fair Haven industrial building houses the Manufacturing and Technical Community Hub (MATCH), a nonprofit manufacturing and training facility. DeLauro — the ranking member on the House Appropriations Committee — has hosted other “tariff tour” events in recent months at a North Haven house, a Grand Avenue pasta shop, and a Ninth Square games store.

DeLauro opened Monday’s discussion by criticizing the U.S.’s “decades of failed trade policy.” Her alternative, 10-point proposal would benefit “everyone,” not just “corporations,” she argued. The proposal has been cosponsored by Pocan, a fellow Democratic U.S. representative and a co-chair of the Congressional Labor Caucus. The proposal calls for enforcing strong labor, wage, and environmental standards across the world; supporting independent farmers and rural communities; and creating guardrails against offshoring.

Hawthorne, a state leader for the world’s largest federation of labor unions, focused his comments on A.I. He called for protections against displacement and automation by deploying A.I. in a “worker-centric” manner.

If you believe that tech CEOs go out of their way to protect workers from A.I., “I have a bridge I would like to sell to you,” he said.

Pocan agreed. “What A.I. is going to do is make people that work in the shop into a liability. A line item that [managers] can cut,” he said. Without protections against displacement, he worries that so many people will lose their jobs that it will become impossible to retrain them all.

The CEOs of Anthropic and OpenAI once projected a dire future for white-collar work. Now, they are walking back those comments, arguing that A.I. will enhance productivity rather than replace human labor.

Whatever its ultimate impacts, DeLauro noted that legislators may not be prepared to regulate A.I. “I don’t know that there’s enough of real knowledge” in the House about the potential costs of A.I. on working people, she said.

The rest of participants in Monday’s conversation nodded in agreement. “Things are changing every week,” said Melinda St. Louis, Global Trade Watch Director at the nonprofit Public Citizen.

The theme of constant change made its way into the group’s discussion of President Donald Trump’s tariff policy.

Trump ran on restoring American manufacturing, “but his trade policy is chaotic,” said DeLauro. All else being equal, tariffs cost each American household $1,800 last year.

According to St. Louis, offshoring has “decimated” communities across the Midwest, eliminating key industries and eroding the tax base. Trump promised that tariffs would bring back those jobs; instead, she said, people are “seeing the opposite of that.”

Since Trump announced tariff hikes in April 2025, the U.S. lost 66,000 manufacturing jobs, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

One reason for job loss is because tariffs increase the cost of inputs, forcing companies to shed workers, said St. Louis. The uncertainty over when and how tariffs will be implemented discourages hiring as well.

Another reason, according St. Louis, is because tariffs have not been paired with incentives to rebuild the domestic manufacturing industry.

Marcia LaFemina, the chair of MATCH, criticized the “broad brush” of tariffs on aluminum. For MATCH, it can cost up to $50,000 to create a single moulding for a street pole.

Rather than increasing tariffs, LaFemina called for subsidies to grow the U.S.’s manufacturing sector.

“Incentivize me to open my own foundry,” she said. “I’ll do it.”

The roundtable of workers, organizers, and representatives pose for a picture.

DeLauro is proposing a “worker-centric” trade policy, which Pocan has co-signed.