Greg Regan, president of the Transportation Trades Department, AFL-CIO, joined America's Work Force Union Podcast for his monthly segment to discuss two issues heading into election week.
The first is Spirit Airlines, which ceased operations in May and is attempting to sell sensitive employee data as an asset. The data included approximately 100 million emails, 500 million Microsoft Teams messages, employee records, timecard records, payroll, tax information and employment contracts, to reportedly train AI models. TTD joined members of Congress in signing a letter to Spirit Airlines and Google, urging caution and guardrails around the proposed data sale. Regan said employees have fewer data protections than consumers and that an employee’s personal information should not simply be available to settle corporate ledger books during bankruptcy.
The second issue is the lame-duck congressional session that follows the Nov. 3 election, during which a surface transportation reauthorization extension must be passed before the current authorization expires in December. The concern would be that, depending on the election results, outgoing members could attempt to push through a range of other legislation without any voter repercussions.
Spirit Airlines is in bankruptcy. The workers, flight attendants, pilots and ramp workers have already been let go. Now the company is treating its employees’ personal data as an asset to be sold during the bankruptcy proceedings.
The data involved is significant in both volume and sensitivity. Approximately 100 million emails. 500 million Microsoft Teams messages, employee and timecard records, payroll and tax information, employment contracts and Social Security numbers are included. All of it is potentially available on the market for training AI models.
Regan said the instinct that this should be illegal is a reasonable one and one he shares. Employees have fewer legal data protections than consumers. When a company goes bankrupt, the people whose personal communications and financial records are in that company's systems have very little standing to prevent those records from being liquidated alongside the furniture and the airplanes.
TTD, alongside members of Congress, sent a letter to Spirit Airlines and Google urging caution and the establishment of guardrails around the transaction. Regan said the congressional reaction mirrored the public reaction: genuine surprise. The letter is not a legal mechanism to stop the sale. Its purpose is to put companies on notice that people in positions of power are watching and to begin building the public and political record for legislation to prevent this from happening again, he said.
Regan connected the Spirit Airlines case to the broader AI regulatory conversation. AI is developing faster than the governance structures designed to manage it. There are more calls for guardrails than there are guardrails. And as AI systems require ever-larger training data sets, the incentive to treat any available data as a resource for those systems — including the private employment records of workers who no longer have jobs — will only grow.
He said the important step is to establish that this kind of data monetization is not acceptable, even if the legal tools to stop it do not yet fully exist. The letter does that. The congressional attention does that. And eventually, he said, it leads to legislation.
With the mid-term election one week away, Regan turned to what a lame duck session of Congress might produce.
The most concrete item on the TTD's immediate watch list is the surface transportation reauthorization. The current authorization expires in December. A full reauthorization bill is nowhere near ready to pass. An extension is the most likely outcome, he said, and securing that extension with a lame-duck Congress during the compressed post-election window needs to be a priority.
Beyond that, the picture is uncertain. Regan said the dynamics depend on the election results. If Democrats flip one or both chambers of Congress — which most projections consider plausible — the outgoing Republican-controlled Congress and the Trump White House face a choice. They can attempt to push through as much of their agenda as possible in the weeks before the new Congress is seated. Or they can do what Republicans did in 2006, when they lost both chambers during the Bush years and simply not return at all. Regan was in Congress at the time and said the assumption was that the outgoing majority would try to act, but instead, they walked away.
He admitted that he does not know which scenario will play out. What he is confident about is that for transportation workers and their advocates, the surface transportation extension needs to happen, and that is the fight to watch in the weeks ahead.
More information on the Transportation Trades Department AFL-CIO is available at ttd.org, where the full text of the congressional letter to Spirit Airlines and Google is available.
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