Sponsors (14)
Official title: To prohibit certain uses of automated decision systems by employers, and for other purposes.
Introduced December 3, 2025 by Suzanne Bonamici · Last progress December 3, 2025
The bill substantially strengthens worker protections, transparency, and enforcement around workplace automated decision systems, but does so at the cost of significant new compliance, disclosure, and litigation burdens for employers (and potential fiscal and administrative strains for governments), plus privacy and state-liability trade-offs.
Workers and job applicants (including contractors and union members) gain enforceable procedural protections — required notice before ADS use, access to human review/appeals, an opt-out to human management, annual bias testing, pre-deployment validation, and operator training — improving transparency and reducing automated discrimination risk.
Covered individuals can obtain remedies: a private right to sue, statutory damages, injunctive and equitable relief, and attorneys' fees, which strengthens enforcement incentives and access to court for workplace ADS harms.
Federal enforcement capacity is strengthened: the Secretary of Labor gains investigatory powers (inspections, subpoenas, joint probes) and State attorneys general can bring parens patriae suits, increasing the likelihood of detection and correction of unlawful ADS practices.
Employers (especially small businesses and public agencies) face substantial new compliance costs — testing, validations, disclosures, training, recordkeeping, investigations, and potential statutory damages — that could raise hiring costs, deter ADS adoption, or strain budgets.
Expanded enforcement pathways (private suits, State AGs, Secretary investigations) increase litigation exposure and risk of duplicative or parallel lawsuits, raising legal costs and uncertainty for employers.
Public disclosure requirements (annual bias-test results, detailed post-decision documentation, machine-readable inputs) risk exposing trade secrets and sensitive personal data, creating privacy and intellectual-property concerns for companies and affected individuals.
Based on analysis of 10 sections of legislative text.
Prohibits employment decisions based solely on automated decision systems and requires testing, disclosure, human oversight, appeals, and DOL enforcement.
Bans employers from making employment decisions based solely on automated decision systems (ADS) and requires testing, transparency, human oversight, appeals, and recordkeeping when ADS are used. Creates a new Technology and Worker Protection Division at the Department of Labor to write rules, investigate violations, enforce the law, and provide a private right of action for workers and labor organizations. The bill defines covered terms (ADS, covered individual, employer), sets pre-deployment and annual independent testing requirements (including nondiscrimination testing and adherence to NIST guidance), requires disclosures and documentation to workers, mandates training and opt-out rights to human management, and preserves other federal and state authorities while coordinating federal regulators on consistent treatment of ADS in workplaces.