Days after the midterm elections, Rep. Ayanna Pressley told a room of Black technologists at the AFROTECH Conference that the hiring software now standing between displaced federal workers and their next job has to answer to civil rights law.
Pressley represents Massachusetts’ 7th Congressional District. She said the “so-called Department of Government Efficiency” had “taken a sledgehammer to our federal government workforce and infrastructure,” and she named what that leaves behind. “While all these Black workers have been displaced and are applying for jobs, most HR departments are using AI tools,” she said, “and we have to make sure that they’re not biased and discriminating.”
Her answer is the AI Civil Rights Act, which she is pushing with Rep. Yvette D. Clarke of New York. She asked the room to call their own representatives. “Make plain to your representatives that the AI Civil Rights Act is an imperative,” she said. “Ask them to be a co-sponsor. I’ll take it from there.”
She measures the stake inside her own district. Within a three-mile radius, from Cambridge to Roxbury, she said life expectancy carries “a 23-year difference,” and “in median household income, the disparity is about $50,000.” Those figures sit behind everything she writes. “I anchor that in every bill that I author,” she said.
She also leads H.R. 40, the reparations bill. The best advice she got as a freshman member in 2018, she said, was never to lose the plot. “The plot is the people.”
