I Was in a Bad Mood Before You Hired Me

Afterward

I lick the envelope.

Imagine I have just lost a job. This is an invented dismissal, not a case in court. I am mailing a complaint because the machine that helped get rid of me apparently knew more about my attitude than I did. The glue tastes bad. For once my expression and the available evidence agree.

California’s governor has signed a package of worker-protection laws. The reported measures include prohibiting employers from relying entirely on AI to decide to fire someone, banning the use of biometric data to predict workers’ emotional states, and banning AI surveillance in workplace bathrooms. I like these developments. I am capable of liking something without immediately putting on a campaign button.

But I have started at the wrong end of the job. Being fired is the part everybody understands. Money stops. An argument begins. A person at home wants to know what happened, and I have to explain that I was judged by something neither of us has met.

The package also requires notice when AI causes mass layoffs. Notice will not preserve a wage. But knowing why the wage disappeared is better than being handed a personal failure to carry home when the company changed the machinery.

There is also the matter of who can do anything about it. Legal scholar Robin Feldman says the new measures have no private enforcement: enforcing these laws falls to government, not individual workers bringing their own suits under them. My imaginary complaint needs a public official with time to pursue it. I can mail the thing. I cannot hire the official.

I still want the law. I want the people and money needed to use it, too. Otherwise I can spend my unemployed afternoon addressing envelopes to an excellent principle.

The review before that

Go back. I am still employed. The rent has not yet become the main subject of every conversation.

Suppose I do the work adequately but the system decides I am unhappy. Perhaps I am. I dislike getting up early. My shoes pinch. Somebody has eaten the food I left in the refrigerator. I can supply unhappiness without a research department.

What I cannot supply is a satisfactory explanation for why the boss needs a second version of my feelings, calculated from my body, to place beside the work I actually did.

If I insult a customer, there is an insult to discuss. If I fail to finish a job, we can argue about the unfinished job. I will probably have an excuse. It might even be a good one. But a machine’s estimate of an inner condition gives me a much stranger assignment: prove I was not feeling what somebody else’s equipment says I felt.

In this imagined review, I can see the cheerful employee doing better than me for reasons unrelated to competence. He could look like somebody worth listening to while explaining that he did not finish the work. I could finish it and still be stuck accounting for my face.

I am not saying these laws outlaw every stupid judgment a manager makes. They concern particular uses of technology. They won’t cure a supervisor who believes everyone should resemble him. I would settle for limiting how much more he gets to know about me.

The ordinary shift

Earlier still, nothing has happened worth reporting. I am at work. I am doing it. This ought to be the uninteresting part.

The new measures also bar collection of workers’ neural data, the information from electrical signals in the brain or nerves. I have apparently brought considerably more to work than my lunch.

The bathroom prohibition belongs to this ordinary part of the day. It should not require a spectacular scandal to establish that a person needs somewhere to take a shit without adding to the employer’s understanding of him.

I don’t want to provide a touching medical explanation. I don’t want a tragic backstory for my bladder. I want to go into the room and come out again, having accomplished something the company does not need to evaluate.

Employers have objections to the laws. Employment lawyer Danielle Ochs argues that tool-by-tool requirements don’t fit how businesses use AI; she also describes concern that restrictions could catch helpful systems, such as ones keeping truck drivers from falling asleep. Fine. I would like the driver awake. I would also like him rested, which tends to cost more than detecting that he isn’t.

There are real distinctions to make between preventing a crash and rating a mood. I am willing to spend time making them. I am unwilling to begin with the assumption that everything my body gives away during paid hours belongs in a company file.

The frightening possibility is not only that these machines will get me wrong. It is that they might get something right which I never agreed to tell the boss.

The application

Back again. I have no employee number yet. I am trying to get one.

Here is where the explanation usually becomes pleasant. Perhaps the monitoring will help me. Perhaps it will recognize distress, improve conditions, find the difficulty before I have to complain. Some of that could be useful. I have wanted a boss to notice I was exhausted. Usually he noticed only after I made a mistake.

But needing the wages is a poor position from which to negotiate how thoroughly I will be understood. In this invented hiring, put the permission alongside the other paperwork. Watch how quickly my principles learn to hold a pen.

So I am pleased workers and unions pushed for a limit that does not require each applicant to stage a private act of heroism. I am tired of protections available only to people who can afford to lose the job. I have never been improved by watching a comfortable man explain how he would have walked out.

I might sign. I might tell myself the information was harmless. I might be sufficiently relieved to have work that I would confuse the relief with agreement.

I don’t want that moment used as the final account of what I am entitled to keep.

Before the application

Go back far enough and there is no employer to explain anything to.

I try to remember being a boy on an afternoon when nothing was required of me. The details won’t all come back. Grass against the backs of my legs. An insect doing more than I was. Some nameless bad mood that would pass without being solved.

I don’t remember having to establish that the feeling was useful. There was no performance I had failed to give. I could lie there, dislike the afternoon, then forget I disliked it. Nobody needed the result by five.

I could not have explained what was wrong. That afternoon, nothing happened to me for leaving it unexplained.

Additional reporting: Gavin Newsom signs laws to protect California workers from AI threat

Source: California’s new laws target workers’ biggest fear of AI taking their jobs