Last week, OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, released something remarkable. Not a product launch, but a policy paper. 

‘Industrial Policy for the Intelligence Age’ is, in effect, Silicon Valley's attempt to write a new social contract for the age of artificial intelligence (AI). 

It calls for a four-day working week. A public wealth fund giving every citizen a stake in AI-driven growth. New taxes on automated labour to replace shrinking payroll revenues. An expanded social safety net that triggers automatically when displacement reaches critical levels. 

Read that list again. A four-day week. Public wealth funds. Robot taxes. Automatic safety nets. These are not proposals from a union manifesto. 

They come from Sam Altman, the chief executive of the world's most valuable AI company, a man whose firm is valued at over $300 billion (€254 billion) and whose technology is already reshaping how millions of people work. 

Proper engagement 

I want to be clear about two things. First, many of these proposals are worth engaging with seriously. The recognition that AI's productivity gains require a fundamentally new approach to how we share prosperity is correct. The acknowledgement that existing safety nets were designed for a different economy and will not hold is overdue. The call for an intervention of New Deal scale and ambition, evoking Roosevelt's transformation of American society in the 1930s, reflects the reality of what is coming. 

But the second thing is just as important: the messenger matters. OpenAI is proposing that society reorganise itself to absorb the speed at which OpenAI plans to develop and deploy AI. It is asking governments to build the infrastructure, fund the safety nets, and manage the social disruption that its own products will cause, while simultaneously lobbying against the regulation that might slow that disruption down. 

A public wealth fund is a far heavier political lift than sensible safety standards. And that is no coincidence: the harder the ask, the longer the delay, and the longer companies like OpenAI operate without constraint. 

There is something else missing from OpenAI's vision: workers themselves. In a 13-page document proposing a new social contract for the age of AI, the word "union" appears exactly once in a passing reference to "incentivising companies and unions to run pilots of 32-hour work weeks." That single mention, thin as it is, is still more than appears in our own government's National Digital and AI Strategy. 

Collective bargaining, the mechanism through which Roosevelt's New Deal gave workers power, through which weekends and paid leave and safe workplaces were secured, is barely a footnote. 

The original New Deal was not designed in a boardroom and handed down. It was forged under pressure from organised labour, from millions of workers who understood that economic transformation without democratic power is just a new form of control. OpenAI's version skips that part entirely. It is a social contract written by and for capital, with benefits distributed to citizens as recipients rather than earned by workers as agents of change. 

This intervention does, however, expose a gap that should alarm us in Ireland. When the most powerful technology company on the planet is acknowledging that AI requires a wholesale reinvention of industrial policy, including shorter working weeks and new mechanisms for sharing prosperity, what does it say about a government whose own strategy contains 90 actions but not a single meaningful framework for worker voice? 

When Big Tech is calling for a New Deal and our government appears to be asleep at the wheel, something has gone badly wrong. 

Consultation 

The current public service pay agreement, expiring in June, acknowledges a "leading role for the public service in embracing and adapting to developments in digitalisation." It commits unions and the employer to consultation. But we have already seen what that commitment looks like in practice. 

The HSE published its AI for Care strategy, covering imaging, clinical decision support, clinical documentation, and contact centre automation, with a stakeholder working group of over 30 organisations. Not a single one represented workers or their unions. Patients were consulted through a ‘Citizens' Jury’. Workers weren't consulted at all. As AI reshapes our economy at pace, the Irish labour movement has no intention of letting that institutional habit continue. 

Fórsa's position is straightforward. If AI delivers genuine productivity gains in our public services, workers must share in those gains. Not as a favour from employers or a concession from government, but as a right negotiated through collective bargaining. 

Reduced working time. Protected time for learning and adaptation. A genuine say in how roles evolve. Reinvestment to improve the quality of services, not just the efficiency of delivering them. And a commitment that the benefits of this transition are shared equitably, not concentrated among those who already hold the most power, while those in the most exposed and lowest-paid roles are left to absorb the disruption. 

We do not need Silicon Valley's permission to demand a new deal for Irish workers. But we do need a government that recognises the scale of what is coming, and the urgency of putting workers rather than algorithms and AI companies at the centre of the response. 

The choice is not between technological progress and fairness. It is whether we have the political foresight and courage to pursue both. 

OpenAI, of all organisations, seems to understand this. The question is whether our government does. 

This opinion piece was originally published in the Business Post on Thursday 16th April. 

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