Fearing AI will take their jobs, workers plan a long battle against tech

This article was originally published on The Markup and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

The current frenzy around artificial intelligence has spread like a shockwave. 

It started among engineers inspired by a 2017 research paper. Next came venture capitalists eager to profit from a new boom. They were followed by government officials racing to impose regulations.

Now it’s labor’s turn.

More than 200 trade union members and technologists gathered in Sacramento this week at a first-of-its-kind conference to discuss how AI and other tech threatens workers and to strategize for upcoming fights and possible strikes.

The Making Tech Work for Workers event was convened by University of California labor centers, unions, and worker advocates and attracted people representing dock workers, home care workers, teachers, nurses, actors, state office workers, and many other occupations. 

A key takeaway from the proceedings: Workers of all stripes are determined to fight — during contract negotiations and amid day to day operations — for the right to negotiate more control over how AI is deployed within companies. Union representatives detailed ways AI threatens jobs, from screenwriting to driving taxis to ringing people up as a cashier. 

It takes a toll on your physical and mental health when tech tracks your every movement, said Luis, an Amazon worker from California’s Inland Empire who asked CalMatters not to use his last name due to fear of retribution. He felt like he couldn’t stop moving or get help from coworkers when lifting heavy objects. That led to back pain that made it hard to sleep at night, and feelings of depression and diminished self-worth.

“I just couldn’t deal with being a robot,” he said, describing why he quit. Later he returned to the job because he had no other opportunities.

Amazon spokesman Steve Kelly responded that "employees are encouraged to work with intention, not speed and can take short breaks at any time to use the restroom, grab water, stretch, or step away from their screen. In addition, there’s nothing unusual about using cameras to help ensure employee safety, inventory quality, or protect against theft—this is common practice at nearly every major retailer in the world. Employees who have questions or concerns about any aspect of this technology or their jobs generally aren’t just permitted, but encouraged on a regular basis, to bring them to their managers and they’re provided several tools to support them in that process."

The gathering comes as President-elect Donald Trump prepares to begin his second administration and shortly before a Feb. 21 deadline to propose bills for the current session of the California Legislature. Precisely how Trump will respond to issues related to tech and workers is unclear. He has made some promises that seem favorable to big tech, like vowing to cut regulations he sees as harmful to innovation and promising to repeal an executive order signed by his predecessor that put safeguards on AI. 

But he has also positioned himself as an advocate for blue-collar workers left behind by tech elites: Just last month he called automation harmful to workers. Observers have also been left baffled by where, exactly, the incoming president stands on issues like H-1B visas for foreign tech talent or how he might be swayed by high-profile adviser Elon Musk, the omnipresent tech billionaire.

Participants at the conference did not focus much on Trump. Instead, they centered discussions on how to protect workers from tech that can exploit them or automate discrimination. Union representatives unanimously urged workers to negotiate how AI and other forms of tech are used in the workplace when bargaining. Many also urged workers to engage more on tech issues by considering how to use tech for organizing or pushing for the establishment of committees where management must discuss tech with workers before implementation.

The roughly 150,000 United Food and Commercial Workers union members — folks who work at stores like Kroger and Albertsons — and the 100,000 National Nurses Union members will both face key fights related to automation this year as they bargain new contracts. The grocery workers will challenge the role of self-checkout stands while nurses contest AI tools they say can influence their duty to care and prioritize profits for health care and insurance companies over patient health.

Corporations have long marketed AI to consumers and investors as a technology that will transform the world for the better. But gatherings like the conference in Sacramento show that unions are also using AI as a way to galvanize workers to organize their workplace.

Unions have a steep hill to climb to grow membership and worker power, said AFL-CIO Tech Institute executive director Amanda Ballantyne, but including AI in collective bargaining negotiations is key, because there are so many use cases for AI in the workplace and workers tend to have strong opinions about them since they are experts in their own jobs and know best the safety implications of a new tool.

A number of union representatives argued at the conference that workers need to gain and exercise power to push back against the rollout of technology with the potential to exploit them, visit indignity upon them, or take their jobs.

A report released earlier this year by the UCLA Latino Policy and Politics Institute found that 4.5 million Californians are in 20 industries labeled at high risk of job loss due to automation, and that more than half of high-risk workers are Latino. Automation that takes jobs away is a major concern for three out of four Americans, according to a Gallup poll taken last year, but AI that makes predictions about workers, manages workers, or attempts to track and quantify their every move is also a major risk, said UC Berkeley Labor Center director Annette Bernhardt. She previously told CalMatters she’s less concerned about AI taking jobs than she is about algorithms used in the workplace treating people like machines.

AI has the potential to reduce discrimination and improve worker health and safety but it also has the potential to drive job losses, help suppress worker organizing efforts, and intensify demands placed on workers, a phenomenon that led to higher injury rates at Amazon warehouses. 

SAG-AFTRA executive director and chief negotiator Duncan Crabtree-Ireland said that AI underscores why it’s important for workers to organize, because doing so can force employers to negotiate their use of AI during contract bargaining rather than unilaterally deciding to introduce the technology in the workplace. But obtaining such contract clauses  requires foresight by union leaders, who must craft a message that can resonate with workers and the public.

“We're up against the biggest corporate interests and the biggest political interests that you can imagine, and working together in unity is absolutely where our power comes from,” he said. “Especially because we're going to have so many challenges on the federal level, in California, we can use public policy to advance collective bargaining and use collective bargaining to advance public policy.”

A lot of tech getting introduced in the workplace is just surveillance of workers, advocates said, and that’s nothing new. “It's the old boss with new tools,” said California Labor Federation president Lorena Gonzalez. Three years ago, as an assemblymember, Gonzalez coauthored a law that prevents algorithms from denying workers break time or worker safety violations. 

Amid uncertainty of how the Trump administration will address union concerns around tech, Gonzalez told CalMatters last week that she is working with counterparts in other states, including Oregon, Massachusetts, and Washington, and Wisconsin to pass legislation to protect workers’ privacy in spaces like break rooms and bathrooms and ensure that they know when an employer is collecting data about them or monitoring job performance.

The California Privacy Protection Agency is currently drafting rules that would require businesses to inform job applicants and workers when AI is in use and allow them to opt out of data collection on the job without consequence. California would become the first state to enact such rules but that regulation is still under negotiation. The California Civil Rights Department is also drafting rules to protect workers from AI that can automate discrimination.

Gonzalez said she doesn’t like to rely on such rules because they  can take a long time to finalize and enforce, pointing to the fight to keep workers safe from hot workplaces, a battle that’s gone on for the better part of a decade.

Meanwhile, people like Amba Kak see opportunities for gains by workers against technological threats but said that it may require strategically picking the right battles. Kak previously advised the Federal Trade Commission and is executive director of the AI Now Institute, a nonprofit that researches the human rights impact of the technology.  

Seizing those opportunities requires paying attention to issues that can build bridges between labor and other actors in the tech justice movement. For example, the activity of data centers can bring together people concerned about the climate and labor and people in local communities who see data centers consume vast amounts of water and energy. 

Kak told CalMatters she plans to pay more attention to activity in state legislatures in places like California and New York, where lawmakers are already considering a bill that protects people from AI in a manner similar to California’s to Senate Bill 1047, a controversial bill requiring AI safeguards that Newsom vetoed last year.

“Labor has been at the forefront of rebalancing of power and asserting that the public has a say in determining how and under what conditions this tech is used,” she said.