Tech Wants to Automate Workers in All Industries. Unions Must Fight Tech.
Over the past 10 years, tech has been working on a new phase of automation to broadly target a wide range of industries. Their arsenals now include robots, autonomous vehicles, drone fleets and artificial intelligence. Wheee!
While we have all been awaiting the robot and drone workplace “revolution”, and are all too aware of its implications for the workforce, we are at a critical point in the timeline because they have finally reached the point in development where they can launch a real first wave. This is starting to hit the workplace at a level designed for rapid deployment and rapid scale… or as we call it in the industry, “mainstream adoption”.
Tech always tests things out on its own workforce first. We call it “eating your own dog food”. We have seen two MASSIVE escalations in the roll-out of automation: computer programmers themselves are now using a coding AI on a day-to-day basis, and Amazon has accelerated its long-dreamed-of automous supply chain... In direct response to unionization efforts.
When there was an initial flurry of activity in early 2022 as workers launched the first Amazon warehouse union, Amazon quietly launched a new $1 billion fund to back companies working on supply chain, fulfillment and logistics automation. It already has robotic warehouses and has spent over 10 years investing in this, mainly under the slogan of “make jobs safer”. The pandemic has accelerated this process because of the economic growth of Amazon during the pandemic and the highest ever volumes of sales it saw; the threat of unionization is accelerating them yet more. And it’s not just just Amazon — the whole industry is working on bringing in the autonomous future as fast as possible.
The major theme of web 3.0 they don’t tell you about is automation. Technology runs using a business model of rapid scale — there is an economic pattern to how they have been able to penetrate global life and systems so effectively and in most cases, catastrophically. So once they reach a liminal moment where they are finally ready to start moving this stuff out globally, things change really fast. Tech scales in numbers like 10x and 100x, which means that they can make some really significant changes really quickly when they are ready.
We should not assume that we have time before this happens, or that once it happens, we will have a chance of rolling it back. In general, technology is not rolled back — this is also key to the business model.
They are planning huge incursions into healthcare, the financial system, “knowledge work”, manufacturing, transportation, retail, real estate and more. Tech has come up with these ideas, come up with these use cases for all these different verticals, figured out who they can sell it to, figured out the most effective automation tool to get into a corporate system and the best way to do implementations. THIS IS BEING DRIVEN BY TECH COMPANIES, NOT YOUR BOSSES. It is a critical mistake to think that what the tech industry is doing is based on what its customers “want”: tech, externally, engineers the visions for corporations, consumers and workers through its platforms and products, and then forces that vision of the world onto them.
This is a threat to every single union, aspiring union, and every single worker in the country. This also demonstrates the futility of taking a company-by-company approach in combatting tech, even in hopes it will lead to some kind of cascade. Once this starts infecting the system, it will happen quickly and it is a lot harder to rip this shit out piece by piece once it is in a hundred thousand different systems and companies, than to stop it in its tracks.
We think of the unionization that is happening inside Amazon and tech companies more broadly, as if this is a new thing to them; after all, it is a field that has barely been touched by unionization. But that is because tech is incredibly skilled at fighting unions. And they have been since inception. Tooth and nail. Shuttle unions, factory unions, janitor unions, driver unions, delivery unions, software programming unions, retail worker unions, cafeteria worker unions, content moderator unions and warehouse unions. They have also dealt massive and sometimes fatal blows to other unionized verticals; for example, Uber took over strong taxi cab unions, fighting a length and devastating battle in the Bay where drivers ultimately lost all union power and instead were part of the definitionally unorganized “gig economy”. Now there is nothing left of the entire industry Uber attacked in the Bay and the labor power that it represented. It only took a few years. In this case we see that the “business model” has as much to do with restructuring the arrangement between workers and management, getting rid of contracts with workers and all the benefits that entails.
Tech has made massive investments in these strategies and products to be sold to ALL industries. Automation is their next big money pot. Here we are in a moment where you see the business model of tech in very sharp relief, that it develops economic weapons like autonomous systems and then deals them out to the world, gaining the massive returns on investment it needs to justify the robot build-out in the first place - - when the automation revolution really gets going, it is because thousands and thousands of companies, VC firms, academic labs, research facilities, went into making this happen. There’s been a lot of money spent on this shit and tech’s business model is to get back a huge return. They like 10x back on its investments, to start. Tech is now going to become arms dealers for an entirely new level of automation and has tasked itself into getting this shit everywhere it can. This is not an option; it is happening. The drive of the industry to get returns on investments cannot be underestimated; they have and will eat cities to get it.
Tech presents a singular threat to workers across the board and to unions and the movement to unionize. It does not make sense to fight this, company by company, warehouse by warehouse, job by job, software contract by software contract. Each has to go through the same long, exhausting work of trying to force these fucks to the bargaining table and convincing them to take robots off it…. And do that in every workplace across the country when the software man shows up at their door again with a new catalog.
In order to fight for labor, workers, unions, it is necessary to take aim at the tech industry itself. As long as tech is able to sell automation of workers at will to corporations, workers will have no leverage, their jobs will always be in jeopardy, and their ability to organize or have job security drops into the pits of hell.
Fighting this particular battle company-to-company, trying to make sure that the management doesn’t bring in this technology, is a non-workable strategy, because it doesn’t scale against a super-scaling enemy; it leaves us fighting this piece by piece while the source remains intact and subject to entering the workplace at any second. You can fight off a software contract once but what about the 10 others that are showing up at the door? Furthermore, where automating becomes necessary to “compete” economically, it is an inevitability.
It is reasonable to take aim directly at the tech elite who are overseeing some of the largest corporations in history, the ones who have been busting your unions but also focused on bringing these union-busting strategies to corporations all over. “Oh, you want a union at the factory? Well, now everyone who works here is a robot.” What tech is going to do, is send the union busting tools it has been building, deep into every field and industry. They are talking about AI replacing teachers and school work, they are talking about transportation with no drivers, cooking without cooks, and computer programmers that are … computer programs.
YOU are not the market for tech innovation, YOU are its TARGET.
They are about to offer something extremely special to industry all over the world and that is the ability to get rid of their workers and to give them a level of leverage over you, that is a massive escalation. The economic situation is ripe for it. Workers have been a huge bottleneck in keeping businesses open under the pandemic conditions, and the labor shortage means that many businesses are limited by their ability to hire employees. Companies do want to have to deal with the many problems that come with human workforces, such as unions and lawsuits and salaries. They have found recent noise around worker organization exceedingly unappetizing.
And tech? Tech wants the money that has been spent on your salary, to be going to them, to make the robots that replace you. Literally. They are not going to try to fight you using “traditional” union-busting tactics at this point, they’ll be fighting you by showing up in industries across America gutting all kinds of jobs from delivery to therapy to computer engineering to manufacturing, at LEAST decimated in the process.
When you are fighting for worker’s rights today, you are fighting with the technology industry too — not just the company you work for and its workers fighting for unionization, but fighting with thousands of AI and automation startups and robot firms who view your job as their market opportunity. The only way to stop this is to go directly to the source, venture capitalists, and to assert the worker’s united right for jobs and job security, against an outside hostile force; and for say over the direction of workplace technologies that affect them. They cannot be building and implementing this shit without consulting workers.
If we do not make a move to secure the entire workforce from these threats, there is going to be just zero leverage here, and that moment is coming very quickly. The overall worker’s movement, the movement to unionize and the movement to unionize the tech industry, face this as a clear and existential threat. Tech has been fighting unions tooth and nail for decades — that’s why it seems like these unions are “the first” and “new”. That’s just how effectively they’ve been squashing this shit.
I’ve recently written in broader detail, why we need to immediately halt AI development. Workers have a fundamental stake in the developments of an industry they have no representation in, a global behemoth that can shake any whole industry with a whim and a shiver. I would think the call to fight automation at its source, could offer a point of unity between worker organizations, exerting combined power, sharing a common problem as well. Someone is coming to bust your union… and it’s a robot.
Every worker has a stake in what the tech industry is building, because it promises mass harm, instability, abuse and impoverishment of the workforce more broadly, as its selling proposition. Time to get into it with them too. Tech is a more powerful anti-union force than we think, because it does union busting for more than just its own companies. It wants to take them out of the whole world.