Reimagining the future of work - towards a right to shape AI - Panellists

Assistant Professor, Utrecht University 

Halefom Abraha is an Assistant Professor at the International and European Law (IER) Department of the Utrecht School of Law. Halefom is a member of the Netherlands Institute of Human Rights (SIM) and the Utrecht Centre for Regulation and Enforcement in Europe (RENFORCE). His research and teaching interests focus on the intersection between law, digitalisation, and labour - specifically, how new digital technologies change work and how legal frameworks respond to protect workers' rights while enabling innovation. 

Professor of Practice; Executive Director, Center for Labor and a Just Economy, Harvard Law School  

Sharon Block is a Professor of Practice and Executive Director of the Center for Labor and a Just Economy at Harvard Law School.  Prior to returning to Harvard, she led the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in President Joe Biden’s White House.  She also served as a senior advisor to the Biden-Harris Transition team, providing advice to the policy, OMB and Labor Agency Review teams on labor, worker empowerment and regulatory policy and participating in briefing and hearing preparation for nominees. 

From 2017 to 2021, Block led CLJE.  During this time, she launched the Clean Slate for Worker Power project, which is a comprehensive policy initiative focused on fundamental redesign of labor law with the aspiration to enable all working people to create the collective economic and political power necessary to build an equitable economy and politics.  

For twenty years, Block has held key labor policy positions across the legislative and executive branches of the federal government. In the Obama Administration, she was the Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for Policy at the U.S. Department of Labor and Senior Counselor to the Secretary of Labor Tom Perez. In 2012, President Obama appointed her to serve as a member of the National Labor Relations Board. While serving in the Obama White House as Senior Public Engagement Advisor for Labor and Working Families, Block led the historic White House Summit on Worker Voice, which explored ways for workers to fully participate in their economic future. At the President's direction, Block also conducted a series of regional worker voice summits across the country.  Prior to the Obama Administration, she was senior counsel to the Senate HELP committee under Senator Edward Kennedy, playing a central role in the debate over the Employee Free Choice Act.  

Block writes frequently on labor, employment and administrative law topics.  She is a senior contributor to OnLabor.org and her opinion pieces have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Fortune, The American Prospect, The Hill, USA Today, Forbes, and Newsweek. 

Anne Evans Estabrook Professor of Employment Relations and Dispute Resolution, Cornell University 

Virginia Doellgast is the Anne Evans Estabrook Professor of Employment Relations and Dispute Resolution in the ILR School at Cornell University. Her research focuses on the comparative political economy of labor markets and labor unions, inequality, precarity, and democracy at work. She is currently studying the impact of digitalization and AI on job quality in in the telecommunications and game development industries. She is author of Exit, Voice, and Solidarity (Oxford University Press, 2022) and Disintegrating Democracy at Work (Cornell University Press, 2012); co-editor of International and Comparative Employment Relations (Sage, 2021)and Reconstructing Solidarity (Oxford University Press, 2018); and co-editor of the ILR Review. 

Associate Professor, Department of Labour Law and Law of Social Security, University of Vienna; Director General, Austrian Ministry for Labour

Martin Gruber-Risak is Associate Professor at the Department of Labour Law and Law of Social Security at the University of Vienna/Austria and since October 2025 Director General at the Austrian Ministry for Labour, Social Affairs, Health, Care and Consumer Protection responsible for Labour Law and the Central Labour Inspectorate. With a rich career spanning domestic and international legal stages, including the University of Passau in Germany and the University of Otago in New Zealand, Martin’s expertise encompasses both Austrian, European Union and comparative labour law. 

Professor of Law, Osgoode Hall Law School, York University 

Valerio De Stefano, PhD, is Full Professor of Law at Osgoode Hall Law School, York University, where he is the inaugural Canada Research Chair in Innovation, Law and Society. Before joining Osgoode in 2022, he was the BOF-ZAP Professor of Labour Law at KU Leuven and previously served as an officer of the International Labour Organization in Geneva. He holds law degrees from Bocconi University, where he also worked as a postdoctoral researcher. 

His research focuses on labour law, platform work, artificial intelligence, algorithmic management, and labour protection in new forms of work. He is General Editor of the Comparative Labor Law & Policy Journal and Editorial Adviser to the International Labour Review. He is the co-author, with Antonio Aloisi, of Your Boss Is an Algorithm: Artificial Intelligence, Platform Work and Labour (Hart, 2022). His work has been cited by courts, governments, international organisations, social partners, and media worldwide. He has advised institutions including the ILO, European Parliament, Eurofound, the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre, and national governments, and is a member of the OECD’s Network of Experts on AI. 

Damon Wells '58 Professor of Political Science & ISPS Fellow at Yale University and Distinguished Researcher at the Ethics for AI Institute in Oxford. 

Hélène Landemore is a political theorist and the Damon Wells '58 Professor of Political Science at Yale University. She is also a Fellow at the Yale Institute for Social and Policy Studies (ISPS), where she leads a program on Citizens' Assemblies, and a Distinguished Researcher at the Institute for Ethics in AI in Oxford.  She is the author of Democratic Reason (2013), Open Democracy (2020), and Politics Without Politicians (2026). Her research has been featured in media such as The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, Financial Times, The Nation, Slate, Foreign Policy, Boston Review,  Project Syndicate, l’Humanité, Libération, Le Monde, and on The Ezra Klein Show.  In 2022-23 she was a member of the governance committee of the French Citizens' Convention on End-of-Life Issues. In 2026 she joined the Committe on Foresight and Collective Intelligence of the French company EDF.

PhD Candidate,  Tilburg Law School 

Rakshita is a lawyer by training and a law and technology researcher. She is a PhD candidate at Tilburg Law School where she focuses on comparative study of regulating algorithmic discrimination in administrative decision-making. Rakshita completed her Master’s in law (BCL) from the University of Oxford with a focus on Law and CS and regulation of emerging tech, where she was also worked as a researcher on Algorithmic Management at the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights, for the project ‘iMANAGE - Rethinking Employment Law for a World of Algorithmic Management’. Her research focused upon law and policy frameworks for regulation of algorithmic management using principles from data protection law, labour law and equality law, specifically from a comparative lens of Europe and Global South. Rakshita has also taught Regulation of Internet Technologies for Stanford University. Previously, she has worked on tech regulation and human rights issues in India with the Centre for Communication Governance and as a legislative assistant in the Parliament of India. She has collaborated and consulted with various international organisations and research groups such as the UNDP, Freedom House, ISOC, OPBP, Human Rights Watch and UN IGF on issues of online speech, internet shutdowns, data protection, digital ID, content moderation and regulation of AI. 

Head of the Labour and Social Security Law Department, Hugo Sinzheimer Institute 

Amélie Sutterer-Kipping has worked at the Hugo Sinzheimer Institute (HSI) of the Hans Böckler Foundation since February 2022, becoming Head of the Labour and Social Security Law Department in 2024. Amélie Sutterer-Kipping studied law at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. She wrote her doctoral thesis at Georg August University Göttingen and Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne as part of a cotutelle programme. Her thesis, for which she was awarded the Franco-German Dissertation Prize, deals with the labour and social law protection of low-income self-employed workers in Germany and France. 

Amélie Sutterer-Kipping teaches European Labour and Economic Law at the European Academy of Labour at the University of Frankfurt, and serves as an honorary judge at the Munich Labour Court. 

Assistant Professor at Eindhoven University of Technology 

Hilde Weerts is assistant professor at Eindhoven University of Technology, where she researchers the challenges that come along with putting responsible AI into practice, particularly in relation to algorithmic fairness and non-discrimination. Her research is highly interdisciplinary, at the intersection of computer science and law. She is also one of the maintainers of Fairlearn, an open-source, community-driven project aimed at helping data scientists assess and improve the fairness of AI systems.