What good is a nurse’s union that spends nurses’ money to make their jobs harder?

On August 27, National Nurses United, the nation’s largest nurses’ union, staged coordinated protests across eight American cities .

Were they picketing for better pay, safer staffing or less paperwork?

No. They coordinated the protests to demand that hospitals cancel contracts with Palantir, whose systems help schedule staff, manage records, and cut the administrative load that burns people out. The union marched its members into the street to stop hospitals from adopting tools that could put their members back at the bedside, in the roles they had trained for.

The same pattern is appearing wherever new tools threaten a dues structure. When the International Longshoremen’s Association went to the bargaining table, it passed over retraining and a share of the gains from a more productive port. It instead demanded an absolute ban on automated cranes and gates and was prepared to choke the country’s supply chain to get it.

In California, SEIU Local 1000 filed grievances seeking a consultative veto over the state’s new artificial intelligence tools, on the theory that a technology that makes a public employee more useful should be slowed or barred. Longshoremen keep American shelves stocked and factories running. State workers can keep the public’s business moving. Both could use better tools to make their jobs more efficient and productive. So why are unions fighting to stop making life better for their members?

American workers have met new tools before, and they have come out ahead. When the telephone displaced the telegraph, the operators who mastered the new instrument built an occupation that had not existed a decade earlier. The assembly line broke the old craft shops and produced the wages and household stability that became the American middle class. The personal computer emptied typing pools and ledger rooms, then opened an information economy whose job titles would have been nonsense in 1975.

Each time, the country grew richer. The men and women who met the change on their own terms grew with it.

Artificial intelligence presents us with the next change. Used well, it frees people from administrative arbitrage that steals time from the real work itself. Productivity on that scale means better conditions, better pay, and a better life for people who do the work. But too many unions are meeting the moment with fear and obstinacy, rather than embracing the future.

The economy is moving without them. Research from the Mercatus Center finds that since early 2024, solo business formation and self-employment have risen 27 percent in the sectors most exposed to artificial intelligence. One person can now do what once required a team, a lease, and a firm’s entire support apparatus.

Union officials, rather than finding ways to make work easier for their members, are using members’ dues for their own purposes. According to the Commonwealth Foundation , the four largest public-sector unions spent more than $700 million on political activity in the 2021-2022 cycle, nearly 96 percent of which went to Democratic candidates and causes. Teachers, nurses, clerks, and tradesmen paid those dues in the hope of a better wage and a safer floor, but the money financed a partisan operation. A union that spends its money on elections rather than on the people who earned them has already shown those people what it thinks they are for.

But further, consider what these unions are campaigning for. Artificial intelligence is already here, and we can use it to make life better. Nurses who learn the new systems will spend fewer hours on paperwork and drudgery and more hours caring for patients — the way most medical professionals would prefer.

Likewise, the dockworker who masters a modern terminal will keep American commerce moving and will be paid for a scarce skill. The public employee who learns to use AI will have better tools to serve the public faster. If the union collecting these workers’ dues will not help them enter that future, they should reject the union.

American workers have always been equal to what came next when they were told the truth about it and given a fair chance to meet it. They built this country by embracing change, working hard, and leaving the world as a better place than the one they had been handed. That work is waiting for them again. Any union that asks them to fear it has forfeited the right to take their money and speak in their name.

Gene Hamilton is a Senior Advisor to the Coalition to Protect American Workers. He previously served as Deputy White House Counsel to President Trump.