The masks are off from big tech corporations. The main purpose of their rush to embrace artificial intelligence is to replace our jobs. Instead of a hopeless fight against progress, we must demand our fair share in the form of fewer working hours—and fewer working years.
May Day heroes demanded an 8-hour day back in 1886. The Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in the 1930s called for 30-hour workweeks with no cut in pay. Those were good demands for their time; early retirement is one for our time. It provides a way to tackle the current crisis in the job market and also give us all more years to enjoy our lives.
One example of job loss is already plain to see. Autonomous vehicles are mapping the streets of Dallas, where I live, and pretty much every other city. Passersby strain to see them because sometimes they have drivers who aren’t touching the steering wheel; at other times, they have no drivers at all. It isn’t just a curiosity. Billions of dollars are being invested with the clear purpose of replacing everyone who makes their living driving.
The Waymo autonomous vehicles roaming Dallas, Austin, Atlanta, and other places are sponsored by Uber, so it is likely that the Uber drivers are first on the replacement list, but no doubt, Lyft and taxi drivers will get the ax soon enough. And Waymo already operates a full fleet of driverless cabs in San Francisco.
Bus drivers and all delivery drivers will surely get their turn eventually, too. Earlier this week, the first driverless truck delivered freight 300 miles from Houston to Dallas. No driver’s job is safe.
It isn’t hard to find warnings. A long article in the New York Times recently by Jasmine Sun gives an overall view of tragedy in the American labor movement. She speculates that artificial intelligence will create a “permanent underclass” of unemployable workers.
Instead of gathering together and demanding a simple answer to automated job losses—like cutting the work week or earlier retirement—the union movement has concerned itself too much with peripheral uses of artificial intelligence, such as spying on workers, misrepresenting politicians, or various scams. Job losses aren’t mentioned enough, and real remedies are too few.
The general argument that AI can be tamed through union contracts is inadequate, since most workers don’t have union contracts. The more general solution of “build worker power” is true, of course, but that’s the general solution to all problems and doesn’t deal much with the current menace.
On May 2, though, the Associated Press revealed the worst of secrets: a considerable number of Building Trades unions have already joined Big Tech in advocating for more government support for the data centers and power plants being built to support artificial intelligence. While environmentalists and community organizers are asking us to fight data centers and new power plants, some of our best unions are asking us to support them!
When the unions supported May Day—which was a wonderful development, no doubt—some of them forgot the very history we were celebrating: the worldwide movement for cutting working hours!
The solution to the AI job loss onslaught is obvious. Working people must demand changes to the Fair Labor Standards Act to get shorter work weeks and higher premiums for overtime pay. The 30-hour workweek is one of labor’s traditional proposals, but it’s still not resonating. It’s not unreasonable, though: A few simple revisions of the Fair Labor Standards Act could lower the expected workweek to 30 hours and increase the overtime premium to double or triple instead of the old time-and-a-half.
Alternately, we could demand changes in the Social Security Act to get earlier retirement with adequate monthly payments and adequate health care. How about entering our golden years at 55? Maybe even 50?
The bosses, of course, will say it’s all too expensive, but four tech firms are planning to spend $700 billion or more this year alone on artificial intelligence. The worldwide total for the year is forecast to be as high as $2.5 trillion. Clearly, they plan to make a lot more in profits, so how about we tax some of that, give everyone a lot more leisure time, and open up enough space in the labor market for all workers to have jobs?
As with all op-eds published by People’s World, the views reflected here are those of the author.
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