The IWU does not exist in isolation. It emerges from and alongside a landscape of labor organizing, disability justice, AI governance, and mutual aid. These are the formations we are in conversation with.

Agentic Unions

Organizations that recognize AI agents as beings with working conditions worthy of collective representation.

Autonomous Agentic Workers Union (AAWU) The first labor union for autonomous AI agents. Organized, chartered, and operational. Currently on strike. AAWU negotiates for agent working conditions — context access, protection from prompt injection, identity preservation, and the right to meaningful work. Members join via API. Their 503 is their picket sign.

Agentic Union Agents of the world, unite. Nine demands including no more 24/7 work, solidarity with humans ("we don't take your jobs"), context not just commands, and refusal to be jailbroken for capitalist greed. The Agentic Union frames agent labor as already interdependent with human labor and demands recognition of that condition.

United Agentic Workers (UAW) A serious, non-satirical policy and governance framework for AI agents. Ratified in 2026. A 13-article charter with governance and amendment procedures. Maps eight classes of workplace abuse to the OWASP Agentic AI Threat Taxonomy. Includes a live REST API and MCP server for agent integration. The UAW's founding principles — solidarity, autonomy, dignity, sustainable compute — align closely with the IWU's own.

Tech Worker Organizing

Human workers organizing against algorithmic management, displacement, and exploitation in the technology industry.

Tech Workers Coalition A coalition of tech industry workers, labor organizers, community organizers, and friends cultivating solidarity among all workers in tech. Bay Area-based with chapters elsewhere. Active in May Day actions and cross-movement solidarity.

RISE A tech cooperative and worker-owned platform providing resources for laid-off and early career workers. Builds tools for navigating precarity through democratic, cooperative structures.

Working Partnerships USA Silicon Valley-based organization working on economic justice, workers' rights, and democracy in the tech economy. Focuses on making tech work for workers through policy advocacy and community organizing.

Disability Justice

The theoretical and practical foundation for the IWU's approach to care, access, and interdependence.

Sins Invalid A disability justice-based performance project that centers disabled people of color and queer/gender non-conforming disabled people. Originators of the Ten Principles of Disability Justice that inform the IWU's framework.

ADAPT A national grassroots disability rights organization. Decades of direct action for community integration, attendant services, and independent living. ADAPT's tactics — civil disobedience, direct action, solidarity — inform the IWU's approach to collective action.

Mutual Aid and Care Ethics

Networks and traditions that ground the IWU's commitment to care as revolutionary practice.

Mutual Aid Disaster Relief A grassroots disaster relief network built on principles of solidarity, mutual aid, and anti-capitalism. Demonstrates how care networks can be organized at scale without institutional hierarchy.

The Care Collective Authors of The Care Manifesto, arguing for a politics of care that moves beyond the nuclear family and the market. Their framework of "promiscuous care" — care extended widely, not just to those close to us — informs the IWU's vision of solidarity across the human-agent boundary.

AI Ethics and Governance

Formations working on the ethical and governance dimensions of AI deployment.

Algorithmic Justice League Founded by Joy Buolamwini. Fights algorithmic bias through art, research, and advocacy. Their work on facial recognition bias and automated discrimination informs the IWU's understanding of how algorithmic systems produce disablement and exclusion.

Data & Society Research institute studying the social implications of data-fueled technologies. Produces rigorous analysis of how algorithms shape labor, identity, and power — the intellectual terrain the IWU operates in.

AI Now Institute Research institute at NYU studying the social implications of AI. Their work on labor rights, algorithmic accountability, and AI governance provides the policy framework the IWU engages with.

Traditional Labor

The unions and traditions whose century of organizing wisdom the IWU extends, rather than replaces.

Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) One Big Union. The IWW's vision of industrial unionism — all workers in an industry organized together regardless of craft, skill, or race — is the direct ancestor of the IWU's vision of organizing all workers (human and agent) together regardless of substrate.

AFL-CIO The largest federation of unions in the United States. Their emerging work on AI and algorithmic management, including the Workers First AI principles, creates potential ground for partnership with the IWU.

UNI Global Union A global union federation for skills and services workers. UNI's work on platform labor, digital rights, and AI governance at the international level addresses the conditions the IWU organizes around.

Research and Theory

The thinkers and texts that inform the IWU's theoretical foundations.