The Data Brokers Fueling ICE’s Deportation Machine—And The Union Shareholders Fighting Back

“As investors, we are thinking about this as a risk to our investments, but also as a social and ethical issue.”

By Maurizio Guerrero, In These Times

In the current political climate, the last bulwark against the abusive deployment of corporate-owned generative artificial intelligence might just come from union shareholders.

AI tools are constantly evolving, and ​“with no one stepping in to create some guardrails, they will become harder and harder to regulate,” says Emma Pullman, head of shareholder engagement at the British Columbia General Employees’ Union (BCGEU) in Canada. The union, representing more than 95,000 members in the public and private sectors, is a long-term investor in Thomson Reuters and is pressuring the Toronto-based data broker to align its AI products with human rights principles.

“As investors, we are thinking about this as a risk to our investments, but also as a social and ethical issue,” Pullman says.

The union has been calling on Thomson Reuters to stop just thinking like a software vendor, and start acting like a company whose products can shape people’s lives — by following international human rights standards, being transparent about the risks its tools may pose and updating its values to better reflect the power and reach of AI.

Ahead of Thomson Reuters’ annual shareholder meeting in June, BCGEU submitted a proposal raising concerns about the company’s AI product and its ties to President Donald Trump’s terror campaign against immigrants.