State Sen. Andrew Zwicker wants New Jersey companies to tell the state which jobs artificial intelligence is going to eliminate. Then he wants to give them a reason to retrain those workers instead of letting them go.
That’s the heart of Senate Bill 4458, the New Jersey Artificial Intelligence Workforce Transition Act, which Zwicker (D–Hillsborough) pitched Wednesday at Verizon’s launch of its AI Skills for America initiative at the Liberty Science Center in Jersey City.
“This is the most comprehensive AI disruption workforce bill that any state has at this point tried to do,” Zwicker said.
As Zwicker described it, the bill would:
- Require New Jersey companies to report which jobs AI will disrupt or eliminate, and how they plan to handle it;
- Offer tax credits and other financial incentives to companies that keep and retrain affected workers in-house;
- Extend and expand unemployment benefits for workers who are displaced;
- Provide grants for retraining;
- Give community colleges incentives to create short, stackable credentials, and give workers incentives to take them.
The programs would be paid for with existing money from a payroll tax that already comes in, Zwicker said.
“The best thing we can do is make sure we don’t have folks unemployed,” he said.
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Zwicker, a physicist who works at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, used himself to make the case.
Nearly everyone will be exposed to AI in their jobs, he said. That’s different from being vulnerable to it. A medical receptionist trying to keep up is in a very different spot than a physicist watching AI take on hard math and physics problems.
“I may be exposed, but I’m not vulnerable,” he said. “I have skills. I have networks. I have savings.”
He cited a Brookings Institution study released in January. It found that of roughly 37.1 million U.S. workers highly exposed to AI, about 6.1 million face both high exposure and a low capacity to adapt. Most are in clerical and administrative jobs, and 86% are women.
The bill writes that idea into law. It would have the state publish an annual “adaptive capacity index” measuring, by occupation and ZIP code, how well workers could weather a job loss, based on savings, age, the local job market and how transferable their skills are.
It also defines an “AI-displaced worker” as someone whose job was eliminated or cut where an employer’s adoption or expansion of AI was a “but-for” cause or a substantial contributing cause. That definition, along with the reporting requirement, is likely to draw the most attention from employers.
“When I go around New Jersey, people don’t know what to expect,” Zwicker said. “They are afraid for themselves, their families, and what it means, quite frankly, for the future of the entire world.”
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The bill was introduced June 15 and sits in the Senate Labor Committee. Sen. Renee Burgess (D-Irvington) is a co-sponsor. An Assembly version, A5316, sponsored by Assemblyman William Moen Jr. (D-Barrington), is in the Assembly Science, Innovation and Technology Committee. It would create a five-year program.
Zwicker said he developed the bill with Maria Heitkamp, chief policy officer at the New Jersey Council of County Colleges.
He said Gov. Mikie Sherrill, whose fireside chat preceded his remarks, “so cued up” what he wanted to say about making government work.
“It is that level of government working at the forefront of what public policy can and must be,” he said.
Zwicker said the state can’t do it alone. Training efforts like Verizon’s matter, he said, “because that will reduce the number of people that will get disrupted.”
But the bill is built for the other scenario.
“We have to hope for the best, but prepare for the worst,” he said.
