Goto

Collaborating Authors

 Labor & Employment Law


Magic: The Gathering Arena developers intend to form a union with the CWA

Engadget

Wizards of the Coast are seeking'a say in layoffs, accountability and a living wage.' The CWA says it has secured a supermajority among workers in favor of unionization for the chapter, called United Wizards of the Coast (UWOTC-CWA). The CWA has filed for a formal election with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), but that will be withdrawn if Hasbro voluntarily recognizes the union by May 1st. At Wizards, we're organizing for a say in layoffs, accountability that runs up and down the chain, and a living wage that actually lets people build a life, said UWOTC-CWA member and senior software engineer Damien Wilson. I'm hopeful about what we can build here and being clear-eyed about why it's necessary. Workers have outlined several areas of concern including protections over layoffs and remote work, generative AI guardrails and mandatory crunch time, along with increased transparency and equity in the workplace.


India's scattered workforce: the chatbot keeping families in touch during emergencies

The Guardian

Subhalata Pradhan, a Gram Vikas fieldworker, talks to Raja Pradhan about the chatbot and addresses concerns over sharing his details. Subhalata Pradhan, a Gram Vikas fieldworker, talks to Raja Pradhan about the chatbot and addresses concerns over sharing his details. India's scattered workforce: the chatbot keeping families in touch during emergencies Covid exposed the lack of data on the country's 140 million mobile migrant workers, but a new project in Odisha is helping to fill in the gaps Mon 16 Mar 2026 02.00 EDTLast modified on Mon 16 Mar 2026 02.03 EDT Raja Pradhan is sitting cross-legged, scrolling on his phone in his village in eastern India when a green WhatsApp chat bubble pops up on the screen. Are you going outside for work? He reads the message twice, unsure whether to respond.




Labor unions urge Gov. Gavin Newsom, California lawmakers to rein in artificial intelligence

Los Angeles Times

Things to Do in L.A. Tap to enable a layout that focuses on the article. Labor unions urge Gov. Gavin Newsom, California lawmakers to rein in artificial intelligence Lorena Gonzalez, with the California Labor Federation, supports legislation to protect workers from AI. This is read by an automated voice. Please report any issues or inconsistencies here . Labor unions urge Gov. Gavin Newsom to protect workers from AI-driven job losses and workplace surveillance.


Blizzard's quality assurance workers finally have a union contract

Engadget

Blizzard's quality assurance workers finally have a union contract The agreement includes guardrails around AI in the workplace and guaranteed pay increases. Almost three years after starting the bargaining process with Microsoft, quality assurance workers at two Blizzard locations have ratified a union contract . The agreement covers 60 workers at Blizzard Albany and Blizzard Austin. The agreement includes guaranteed pay increases across the three years of the contract, assurances that workers will be given fair credits and recognition on games that ship, discrimination-free disability accommodations, restrictions on crunch (i.e. Stronger rules around the use of AI are included in the contract as well.


French Ubisoft workers vote to strike

Engadget

A logo of Ubisoft is seen at its booth during the Gamescom video games trade fair at the Trade Fair Center in Cologne, western Germany. When deciding which video game to buy, Is it fun? is no longer the only consideration. Given the state of the industry, Do I want to support this company? is arguably more important. Take, for example, Ubisoft, where things seem to unravel more each day. After the floundering publisher floated even more layoffs this week, workers at its Paris headquarters said, Enough is enough.

  Country:
  Industry:

Labubu toy manufacturer exploited workers, labour group claims

BBC News

A labour rights organisation claims it has found evidence of worker exploitation in a Chinese factory that makes the viral Labubu dolls. China Labor Watch (CLW), a US-based non-governmental organisation, alleges that its investigation found that one of Pop Mart's suppliers made employees work excessive overtime shifts, sign blank or incomplete contracts and did not give them paid leave. The furry Labubu dolls have surged in popularity around the world in recent years and are best known for selling toys in blind boxes, which hide its content from buyers until it is opened. Pop Mart told the BBC that it is investigating the claims. The Beijing-based toy retailer said it appreciated the details from the review and that it will firmly require companies making its toys to correct their practices if the allegations are found to be true.



HALF: Harm-Aware LLM Fairness Evaluation Aligned with Deployment

Mekky, Ali, Herraoui, Omar El, Nakov, Preslav, Wang, Yuxia

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed across high-impact domains, from clinical decision support and legal analysis to hiring and education, making fairness and bias evaluation before deployment critical. However, existing evaluations lack grounding in real-world scenarios and do not account for differences in harm severity, e.g., a biased decision in surgery should not be weighed the same as a stylistic bias in text summarization. To address this gap, we introduce HALF (Harm-Aware LLM Fairness), a deployment-aligned framework that assesses model bias in realistic applications and weighs the outcomes by harm severity. HALF organizes nine application domains into three tiers (Severe, Moderate, Mild) using a five-stage pipeline. Our evaluation results across eight LLMs show that (1) LLMs are not consistently fair across domains, (2) model size or performance do not guarantee fairness, and (3) reasoning models perform better in medical decision support but worse in education. We conclude that HALF exposes a clear gap between previous benchmarking success and deployment readiness.