The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) exists to protect investors by maintaining orderly markets and to facilitate capital formation. It does not exist to protect workers and their interests. However, that does not mean that readers of this blog should ignore the Commission’s activities. It regularly engages in activities that impact unions, union pension funds, and workers. This post gives but one example.
Last year, the SEC’s Investor Advisory Committee (IAC) hosted a panel examining the impact of AI on company operations. One of the panelists was corporate law scholar and OnLabor contributor Matthew Bodie. Following that panel, the IAC approved a recommendation calling on the SEC to require that publicly traded companies disclose the impact of AI on operations in two broad categories. The first category is consumer-facing matters. For example, airlines are using AI to determine how much a customer should pay for a flight. The second category is the impact of AI on internal operations. That includes the disclosure of layoffs resulting from the use of AI, and disclosures on spending to upskill workers, or, to use the language of corporate governance, human capital. To make sense of what this means for workers and their unions, I need to explain securities regulation.
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