NWU members aren’t the only organized workers thinking strategically about the impacts AI is having on our working conditions these days—it’s on the mind of the labor movement writ large.
That’s why earlier this month staff organizers from CWA and the AFL-CIO Technology Institute teamed up with UNI Global Union researchers and the Cornell School of Industrial and Labor Relation / Center for Applied Research on Work (ILR CAROW) to host a combination academic conference/international labor workshop on AI’s impact on labor and organizing conditions.
The National Writers Union was invited to join an international, cross-sectoral cohort of unions that included both organizers and rank-and-file members from National Nurses United, SEIU, RWDSU, Teamsters, SAG-AFTRA, AFT, IAM, UNITE HERE, USW, AFGE, Meow Wolf Workers Collective, Alphabet Workers United, and FEDOTRAZONAS (a union in the Dominican Republic that includes call center workers).
Throughout the two-day academic conference, unionist attendees heard from researchers out in the field studying how AI is actively impacting workplace mechanics, particularly through increased surveillance, automation, and bias, and decreased worker autonomy, worker-involved decision-making, and overall quality-of-life.
Researchers from India named augmentation as a more worker-friendly end goal for AI than automation, while researchers from Italy noted that when it comes to policy solutions, the “risks” that AI technology is seen as a solution to are quantitative, which is in tension with the fact that the “rights” of workers are qualitative, and researchers from Germany highlighted data that shows that any inclusion of AI into management systems can only succeed if it’s explicitly “human-friendly” and also accompanied by a “whole org” transformation of the company’s mission, values, power dynamics, and organizational culture.
These academic panels were all fascinating, but as the last academic discussant for the unionist-facilitated workshop panels noted the following day, there remains a stark difference between what labor academics have been able to gather through research, and what us workers and organizers on the ground, fighting AI’s incursions every day, just know. And that gap is on academics to bridge, because the rest of us, we’re in the fight.
For our specific purposes as independent creative workers organizing within the National Writers Union, the biggest takeaway from the workshop was relational: we were able to make connections with organizers across sectors, and open doors to relationships we hadn’t yet made, including with Executive Vice President of SAG-AFTRA, Linda Powell, who loved our Principles & Policy Platform zine and who gave us a hard copy of some relevant AI-protective contract language they won after their historic 2023 strike.
I will be sharing more detailed takeaways with the wider Generative AI Working Group at our next monthly meeting on October 4. If you would like to be added to that email list, or join us in our working group Signal thread, contact me at alexis.gunderson@gmail.com.
Programming note: ILR will be hosting a series of online, film-based participatory workshops on “AI @ Work” through early November. The NWU Generative AI Working Group will likely be organizing a cohort to participate in one of the October sessions; email alexis.gunderson@gmail.com if you would like to join.
