When Data Speaks, Power Listens: AI, Equity, and the Future of Collective Bargaining

Ontario’s Ministry of Labour, Immigration, Training and Skills Development (MLITSD) Labour Relations Solutions Division (LRSD) provides neutral dispute resolution assistance to support a harmonious labour relations climate. Currently, Collective Bargaining Ontario (CBO) holds over 70,000 collective agreements (CA) and receives approximately 3,000 requests each year. CBO supports around 16,000 collective bargaining relationships in Ontario. Responding to these requests requires identifying key content, converting it into structured data, and standardizing it for analysis, before it becomes ready to use. These processes are resource-intensive, significantly slow down staff responses to client requests, and makes it challenging to strategically uncover meaningful insights across multiple data sources.

LRSD will present their current work to implement an AI Agent to address the challenges to automate intensive data-preparation tasks. The team have been using AI since 2021 to provide reports to support dispute resolution but want to further modernize to instantly deliver structured, ready-to-use insights such as clause extraction, summarized trends, anomaly detection, and interactive visualizations.