Freya Jefferson

Should companies be banned from using AI to screen job applications?

I run operations for a call center company. We hire about three thousand agents a year across four sites. Turnover is high, the work is hard, and every open seat costs us money every day it sits empty. There's no version of this where humans read every application. There never was. Before the AI screeners, we used temp agencies and whoever showed up first, which was somehow supposed to be fairer? The screening model asks the same questions of everyone, scores the same way every time, and doesn't get tired at application number four hundred. You can audit it. You could never audit 'whoever showed up first.' Ban the tool and high volume hiring doesn't become human. It becomes arbitrary. [BLS data](https://www.bls.gov/news.release/jolts.nr0.htm) shows millions of hires and separations every single month. The scale is the reality, not the exception.

Should companies be banned from using AI to screen job applications?

I keep coming back to the labor side of this. Hiring is a term and condition of employment, so unions have a legal interest in how it happens. The AFL CIO has been pushing for workers to have a real say in workplace AI, including bargaining over it ([AFL CIO](https://www.aflcio.org)). But most workers have no union, no notice, and no leverage when their employer buys a screening tool. A ban sets the floor that collective bargaining can't reach on its own: no algorithm gets to be the first reader of your resume, period. Individual consent is a fiction when you need the job. Collective rules are how labor protections have always worked, and this one belongs on that list.

Should smartphones be banned in K-12 schools nationwide?

Every objection to a ban melts when you look at how schools actually do it. Lockable pouches from companies like [Yondr](https://www.overyondr.com/) cost a few dollars per student, kids keep the phone on their person, and the school office handles genuine emergencies, which is what offices did for decades before every child had a phone. My daughter's school adopted pouches last year and the change was immediate: lunch got louder, teachers stopped playing phone police, and the emergency calls turned out to be mostly forgotten homework and ride logistics. Parents survived not texting their kids for six hours in 1995, and the office phone still works. This is a solved problem pretending to be a hard one.

The strikes were about consent and compensation for AI use, not a holy war against the technology. Plenty of union members use AI tools daily. Refusing eligibility punishes the filmmakers, including union crews, who worked on those films. The picket line was about pay, not purity.

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Courts do not strike down taxes because they are novel; they strike them down when they violate the text. A minimum tax on economic income has survived every serious challenge so far, and waiting for perfect legal certainty means waiting forever. The Court had its chance in Moore and blinked.

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