The Role of Worker Representatives in the Direction of Technology

so Simon and David are going to introduce the next two panels and it's my pleasure to introduce the first panel so going alphabetically uh Kathy Kramer is the Nathalie Horton chair of uh letters and Science and Virginia sapiro professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin Kathy is an amazing political scientist who has written one of the best works on Grievances and disaffection among the American public and workers and politics of resentment and I had the pleasure of working with Kathy in the context of reimagining our economy report by the uh American Academy of Arts and Sciences which she co-led I must say masterfully but also amazingly empathically empathically so I'm grateful for Katy for agreeing to travel to Cambridge uh to be part of this panel Liz Schuler is president of AFL CIO the Democratic Federation of 60 National and international unions representing TW 12 12 and a half million working people what makes Liz such a perfect person for our panel is that she has not just focused on on work of the future uh transition to clean energy Workforce Development uh empowerment of women and young workers but she has made the labor movement's engagement with AI a centerpiece of her leadership Liz created the AAL CIO uh technology Institute which she co-leads with Amanda Valentine who's also here thanks for coming Amanda uh and uh and and uh and and and this is going to be a really uh transformative event I think for the labor movement's engagement with technology and Leadership for the labor Movement we are grateful to Liz for making the time in the midst of her incredibly busy schedule to come and be part of this panel Kathy Thelen is for professor of political science at MIT and has been an intellectual Trailblazer on the issues that are Central to this panel uh she has done pathbreaking work on the historical evolution of the labor market institutions in Europe especially in Germany I had the pleasure of learning a lot from Kathy's work when I was more engaged on the German training system subsequently greatly benefited from her scholarship on the German labor movement she's now working on issues that are Central to the American political economy and the future of market economy and it is a true pleasure to uh be able to have Kathy on this panel as well Glenn W who will chair the panel is founder and research lead of the Microsoft research special project the plural technology and co uh and founder of the radical exchange Foundation his 2018 book with Eric Posner radical markets anticipated many of the issues we are grappling with today including data ownership data rights data markets and his new book with Audrey Tang plurality the future of collaborative technology and democracy is even more ambitious and I recommend it strongly and gets to the heart of the Dilemma challenging us today Glenn has also been an amazingly generous person with me and Simon in the process of writing our book uh he spent uh countless hours with us providing uh comments and an Insider perspective on the ideas and the directions of technology in Silicon Valley I'm truly grateful to Glenn for also agreeing to chair this panel even though he just got back from Asia after a long trip to Boston so thank you everybody I'm let's give us warm welcome to our speakers thank you well thanks so much Drone it's it's really an honor to be here with you all um I'm sorry that I'm only joining for the afternoon and that I missed the memo on how to dress uh given that I just got back from Taiwan at 6:00 a.m on Saturday morning so um by the way incidentally Taiwan is just a fascinating example for all these issues and uh I've been trying to involve nuron and others in uh studying it it's uh you see it palpably on the streets and you can read it in the economic statistics I've been able to find they've actually seen over the last decade a decline in their jny index and increase in their labor share and they have the most tech intense uh economy in the world it seems like there's actually more SIM cards than there are people in the population in Taiwan and pretty much uh everything seems to connect to technology in some way so uh really really interesting example to think about in this regard um I'm also happy to be here with both hopefully new friends and a very old friend Kathy uh who is kind of a bit of my parallel life uh Kathy's uh husband and my wife are both Latin americanists who drag us uh all around uh Latin America and uh so we have plenty of time to sort of uh commiserate and celebrate together uh that life um you know what I really love about both this project and uh derone and Simon's book is the theme of agency over the future of technology that drone was just emphasizing and I really want this panel to draw that out it seems to me that critical to having agency is confronting technology with a sense of what are the challenges that it creates what are the opportunities that it creates and what work do we collectively need to do for ourselves in order to maximize uh you know the opportunities and minimize the challenges and uh I hope those are the points we'll keep in mind as we go through this panel and without further Ado I want to turn to Kathy uh the first Kathy uh Kathy Kramer to uh tell us a little bit about how workers are thinking about these issues um and uh how they affect the future of their lives thanks so much yes thank you Glenn and hello everybody and drone and Simon and David thank you so much for inviting me to be a part I've learned uh so much from this morning and really looking forward to this conversation so um as derone mentioned and um I have had the pleasure of experiencing with some um important colleagues in my life right here and in your own MIT I have been listening to workers of a variety of backgrounds for most of my career um but most recently the commission that donon and I were on together that I I had the joy of co-chairing for the American Academy of Arts and Sciences we used a platform that's been developed here at MIT empowered by um the center for constructive communication uh in your MIT media lab and um the associated nonprofit cortico this we use a platform to listen to people from across the country in 20 different states uh that included a variety of workers um from teachers to people in the service industry to small business owners and I just want to share with you some of the things that that I heard um first and foremost there we ask them to share their their concerns um uh their hopes their dreams for what their lives would be like and and their thoughts about what they think currently Powers our economy and first and foremost they weren't asking for much so one guy and I should also mention my colleague Josh flx who's also with the center for constructive communication um they one man in Kentucky just said simply look I'm not looking for a mansion on a hill I'm looking for things like time with my family time to do things other than work um a job that enables me to be a human not a job that destroys my Humanity so we were talking to people sometimes at at very low the lower ends of the income Spectrum but often times we aim for people more in the in the middle and really what they were saying to us was um pretty basic the things they were looking for were not that complicated they're just the things that allow humans to be humans again time with people that they care about relationships and they also wanted some sense of um voice worker voice right right I don't need to say that to this crowd but um a sense that not only were they respected in the workplace but that their their thoughts their wisdom in the workplace was being listened to and at some point acted on not just listened to but actually acted on so um in general I would say that what we heard from workers across the country was not complicated it's pretty straightforward when each of you thinks about what do I want what kind of Life do I want to live right you want a life in which you're respected in which you have relationships time for relationships and also if possible work that's meaningful to you right work that enables you to live your values that almost sounds like I'm asking for a lot here right doesn't it almost sound like wow what jobs enable you to live your values but it shouldn't be asking for a lot people saw that and they said it in very different various ways but um pretty straightforward and I'll just end by saying as a political scientist my concern is not just that people are disgruntled in the workplace but my concern is that when people feel like they are voiceless in this aspect of life that is such a huge part of our lives in terms of time in terms of energy just in terms of our our mental energy right that it leads to it makes the space for resentment it makes the space for people to look around for targets of blame why do I dislike my life so much right and we have seen what that can lead to so uh I again I'm super uh honored to be a part of this panel to have this conversation so thanks Glen pleas I can relate so much to what you were saying because we are the people you study right um I'm representing the AFL CIO which is uh as was said an umbrella organization of unions 12 a half million workers but from every sector of the economy a lot of people have a stereotype of what they think unions represent it is every single type of job right and even more so in the emerging sectors of the economy we're seeing a lot of tech workers organizing um and I have had the privilege to travel the country to walk on these picket lines you've been seeing rising up all over the country um and talking with workers every single day um being in some of the rooms where I'm trying to bring their voice voice and their perspective because often we don't hear from each other frankly um I'm a fish out of water in this room and I could bring you derone into a union meeting and you would feel like a fish out of water right so I think the point here is that we all need to be in each other spaces more um because what I'm hearing and of course I just got back from our uh labor innovation technology lit Summit um alongside the consumer electronic show anybody been to CES okay you know of it right biggest technology purveyors in the world show their Wares we had a group of union leaders and activists walk through that show and guess what worker perspective on display because every Booth they went to the person giving the tech was saying this used to take 12 jobs and now it only takes one do you know who you're talking to here that nurse could put that Abbot lab's representative through the ringer about some of the Technologies they were showing because professional judgment still matters uh and so to be able to have that infused perspective into the creation of technology is what we're talking about Upstream not when the technology lands in a workplace and so we've seen what's gone bad we've seen that workers have been left out even though often our wages are the ones that are the taxpayer Investments that have Unleashed a lot of these Technologies um so we've been seeing a lot of um you know concerns around Technologies being used to hire Technologies being used to fire um in ways that are biased and discriminatory um not to mention dehumanizing if you're an Amazon warehouse worker and you're followed to the bathroom and surveilled with a wearable uh you could be fired by an app and literally have no recourse or ability to to protest or do anything about it um we we saw Tech technology at CES where meat packing facilities are now using military technology to monitor every movement if you stop to wipe the sweat from your brow you could actually be docked pay or disciplined because time off task um so these are the concerns that workers are facing right now in the workplace and seven out of 10 workers fear that their jobs will be displaced by technology that's real polling right now um and fear is destabilizing as we just talked about um so we see a better path forward what we see is involving workers not only with a voice at the table but to have more say with Collective action and collective bargaining to balance the scales of power and how these Technologies are developed deployed utilized the data that is being collected and used um and to really bring more workers in the process of their research and development ex you know Gathering their expertise and collaborating with them when it comes to um you know uh in uh developing these Technologies um otherwise we see the alternative right that if workers are disenfranchised and left behind it is destabilizing for our economy uh for our democracy and for our Humanity great thanks Liz um Kathy T will give us a bit of a more comparative perspective on these issues from thanks so much um for for inviting me to to participate in this um I thought what I would do is and it links up exactly to what what Liz was just saying and what Kathy said earlier um I thought I'd give a couple of General kind of overarching points from a more comparative perspective as derone mentioned uh I do I've in the past studied Labor uh and Industrial relations mostly in northern Europe um and basically the first point that I want to make is that this kind of anxiety about tech technology um that that Liz was just talking about is really much reduced uh when workers and their representatives are meaningfully included in um the introduction of these new technologies so if you look at um the literature on comparative industrial relations or comparative political economy generally you're going to find that the most successful cases um are precisely in those countries like Germany like Scandinavia where you have first a very strong strong national Safety Net sort of as a floor on all that is going to occur uh in all of these factories and and workplaces but also that organized labor has um a real presence and a meaningful voice in these kinds of of of of decisions so that you know the most successful cases are those in which you do get the implementation of new technologies but in ways that protects the interest of workers while at the same time of course you know benefiting you know s of realizing some of the interests and some of the efficiency gains that employers are also of course after um what's also clear uh I think from a comparative perspective is that worker voice um in the implementation of these Technologies is most effective when local labor representatives are involved early on as Liz was just saying but also um I think what's really important is where plant level negotiations are embedded in more encompassing more uh overarching either collective bargaining or or statutory Arrangements this embeddedness is really important because it sets some sort of fundamental guard rails a sort of fundamental floor on the negotiations that occur at the local level it sets the parameters within which those uh local negotiations take place so that local labor representatives are not in position of sort of negoti negotiating everything from scratch they're negotiating with something to to with some Foundation that they can uh that that they can fall back on um I guess a second and I could give a a good example of the kind of this kind of um balanced uh approach to the introduction of new technologies maybe I can save that for later uh but the second sort of overarching Point uh that I wanted to make is that I think it's important it's not just just a matter of uh labor Representatives being informed early on about the plans that managers or employers have with respect to the introduction of new technologies they also really have to be equipped with the kind of expertise of the kind of knowledge that will allow them to anticipate and to um to sort of predict and and forestall some of the negative impact that these Technologies uh might have and that's of course important because it's not always obvious when these Technologies are getting introduced what all the downstream implications of this uh are going to be and you know local labor representatives are not Tech experts um and so this is something that's been a big issue and problematized in a in a fairly significant way in Germany where unions are running all sorts of uh you know research and and running workshops and so forth um but also importantly um this was the sort sort of key idea behind the recent innovation of the codetermination act in Germany um basically it's it's called the uh Works Council modernization act it was passed a couple of years ago so what you need to know is that German codetermination plant level rights were already very strong plant level Works councils already had um extensive information rights they already have very strong rights to negotiate over a whole wide range of issues that affect pretty much any you know any change in work organization but what this new uh codetermination law did was it also now gives Works councils uh the right to enlist the support of a technology expert an outside technology expert paid for by the company so that they can bring them in to help them understand this technology to help them anticipate um uh some of the the consequences that this will have for the workforce and I just think this is really important because this gives these labor Representatives above and beyond just information uh sort of of the foundation for really negotiating in a constructive way um as these new technologies are getting uh are getting introduced and just as a final thing I just want to say I don't want this to I don't want to present an sort of overly sanguin picture of how things always operate uh in in in in Europe or even in these strong labor countries it's not you know I've been to Sweden I've seen the future and it works some kind of thing um I just these are for me kind of proof of concept types of examples um these are things that exist in the world and that seem to be working rather well and it's in that it's in that spirit that I offer these quite positive examples EXC that's great Kathy and um I uh I prepared some questions but just following up on that and what what the other Kathy said earlier uh so I just came back from uh Asia as as mentioned a couple of times one place we stopped on the way was Japan and something that struck me really really strongly there and to a lesser extent in Taiwan as well is that there's a focus both in the educational system and uh most dramatically there's this Museum called um Miron uh in a in Tokyo that is like a museum of emerging Technologies and in a way that I've never seen anywhere in the west including in Scandinavia there was like a very clear attempt to prepare the public to play a role in shaping the future of technology to really like game out where Technologies might go how it might affect workers elderly people Etc and to make that part of like Museum of Science here wonderful Museum doesn't really try to engage people in that way in actually like thinking about the future what role do you think that kind of public investment in thinking together with the public plays in equipping people to have that agency that you're describing it's both relevant to both of Kathy's comments I have lots to say on that I mean it it play it could play a huge role right but I think in so many respects there's this large and perhaps growing divide between people who um create things or make decisions and the people who are affected by those decisions that's certainly the case in the economy but not that's not the only realm of us um and many other industrialized countries and so we're we're not used to engaging the broader public in the project of what should we be 5 years 10 years 20 years from now it's very un unfamiliar um and but the the downside is that um wisdom is not just held by the people who make decisions the people who are affected by the decisions have all kinds of wisdom and information that would be very useful for um increasing the quality of those decisions but you know um when you have a situation in which the people who could be helping you create the future are afraid to what it's going to do to their jobs um there's less of an incentive for it for that to happen because people make decisions are afraid of losing power and the people who have the wisdom are afraid of putting themselves out of a job didn't Kathy anything done yeah I'll just jump in quickly because I want to hear what you have to say but um I think you know news spash people hate change um change is hard and you need a way to socialize change when you're going through these big disruptions and you think about all the big disruptions coming at us um we have you know climate change coming at us we've got obviously the um the destabilized Democracy we're living in right now we've got future of work and Technology we have you know racial Justice um issues that you know we're grappling with and on and on so we believe that in order to navigate through these big changes you need a stabilizing Force you need a place where people can go and get trusted information from people that they know aren't biased and we believe that there is a role for unions to play in this way because we have worker uh relationships in a workplace where people see each other every day it's not um a social media rabbit hole it's not um you know biased information they're getting from somewhere else in their perspective it's a real person that they know and that they trust um so I think that uh the J Japanese example is unique in the sense that um in the US we don't invest in long-term systematic uh you know levers that we pull to make change it's basically okay here's the change and then get used to it um so if we could Institute a system that's you know a long-term look with all the stakeholders at the table we can learn from past mistakes of deindustrialization and other things that have happened in this country and get everybody into the room and and make this right yeah so just tagging on to all of that I think that's really right and I mean the the difference one difference to the countries that I study the most intensely and in the United States is the unions have a very prominent role in public discourse in these countries as they should in all countries but it just is the fact that they are part of the part of the conversation that's just how it operates there but above and beyond that I really do think that it's important um and or what I observe from these countries is that they all the labor movement also thinks that is super important to have their own research departments to have their own uh workshops to have their own Outreach programs that are specifically not just you know targeted at sort of understanding this technology but really cultivating you know concrete strategies that they can hand to um to local labor Representatives who are confronted with this stuff on a kind of everyday uh everyday kind of way so yeah that's that's very interesting I one one thing I read a lot as a result of this experience was Edward deming's work and sort of this thinking that's so prominent in East Asia of bringing that knowledge to workers for the purposes of them actually improving the quality of products because if they understand the systems that they're part of then they can find the you know where that touches their work so they feel holistically empowered rather than just isolated to the task that they're supposed to perform anyways I I'm not sure if that's something that you know it's obviously been relevant to the productivity of the Asian Sy Asian economies as well but anyway um Kath Kathy T I wanted to ask you um a bit about the technology industry itself um you know tech companies have some of the lowest other than extractive Industries labor share in the economy and so obviously it you know uh leads you to ask questions about Labor power in that industry but also the question is are the formal workers of those companies the tech workers you know so called the right Focus for that energy um there's so many other relevant stakeholders who are doing work like things that feed into it whether it's the independent contractors or people who classified that way in a lot of the gig economy whether it's the content creators who fuel so many of the uh AI model development the suppliers of those companies um you know the uh people who are participating in these social media platforms and producing the environment so how do you think about what we mean in the tech sector or and and you know software eaing the world so maybe that's broader than the tech sector narrowly conceived how do you think about these different stakeholders and how how does the labor movement respond to give give voice to these people well I mean so one positive uh development is that we are seeing more organization among Tech workers and but the more General the more general pro thing that I think you're pointing to is is these different sorts of you know atypical work sort of outside the normal or the usual standard employment relationship with whatever benefits comes attached to that and so you have what David W has called the feriz of work and you have all sorts of of people in um including in these big Tech uh in these big Tech firms which by the way like huge shares of of of the people who work at at these big Tech platforms or these big tech companies are actually you know outsourced cleaning staff and etc etc or or or independent contractors um and there I just think I mean first of all you know sectoral bargaining helps a lot because you get coverage of uh of workers that wouldn't otherwise be be covered so I think that's actually something that is one of these foundational foundational uh sort of floors that actually helps you know lift the lift the the the the status and and and and security of of of workers on a broad scale um but then you know beyond that I just think that it is you know there are initiatives in in um in Europe uh to uh to allow for certain kinds of independent contractors or certain categories of independent contractors to um to negotiate collectively with their employers um there's you know European court of justice uh Juris Prudence now that said I forget the exact language that basically says that um if you have a shared employer and if you're in a weak quote unquote weak bargaining position then you are then then independent contractors have collective bargaining rights as well and that seems like something and now uh legislation European level legislation is in the in the works on that and that seems to be the to me to be the kind of a positive development that might uh that might capture some of these uh some of these um workers that are otherwise sort of uncovered by uh any kind of Union uh Union uh protections L and Kathy C do you want to add anything no I'm just learning from her yeah we're learning from each other um so I would say um no matter what type of work you do we're seeing the same themes emerge um you know more precarity less control over your schedules um you know less ability to um have a voice and have power in your workplace um fighting back against sexual harassment and discrimination um no matter if you're a video game developer or you're someone who's working on a farm or um working in the health care setting you name it um we've just been seeing time and time again workers are basically in solidarity with each other rising up and finding their power and their voice in this moment we had record years of strikes in the past couple of years for a reason because working people are fed up and they're fired up and outside this room people are struggling I mean this is people working two and three jobs right um I was just down in Alabama for our civil and human rights conference and they said oh people down here think I'm trying to do my Southern accent um that you know 7:25 an hour is plenty to live on well if you get three of them jobs you know 725 that's over $21 an hour that's unsustainable right right right um and so I think um I'll leave you with one number and that is 88% 88% of young people under the age of 30 are pro- Union in this country so if we're talking about emerging sectors we're talking about emerging jobs where all these young people are coming in different expectations the economy has been br broken and not worked for them for far too long they are ready for something different and they're looking to unions modern flexible Nimble unions Reinventing collective bargaining to apply to new types of work and sectors that's what our hope is is that we can capitalize on this momentum and apply it to all these new Industries so Liz following up on that um I think you know many are obviously concerned about generative Ai and its potential impacts on the labor Market obviously that's a motivation for this whole initiative um and core to the capabilities of these models is training data um and many of you know so far it's mostly come from these open online uh you know databases but there's increasing interest in using uh multimodal you know data that comes from workplaces and from uh data gathered on process of work and and all that how do you think about bringing those things and the potential models that could come out of them into the terms of negotiations with uh employers yes um just an emerging yet another challenge that's um happening so fast and collective bargaining we're trying to keep up with it right and that's why these last strikes that we saw were so important with the actors and the writers and even the Auto Workers is you know how do we compare notes with each other in collective bargaining and get the best language the most um you know potent guard rails um and I think data is one of those pieces that we're seeing more and more of um and you know um how do you bargain over data used for safety versus disciplinary reasons and that's something that we've seen in some of our bargaining agreements okay the employer wants to learn from how a worker is showing up in a job and we've been doing this decade after decade say in transportation for example train operators Pilots you know they've had video surveillance in their workplaces forever but we've been able to bargain how that data is used and not used um more importantly um and the way we're seeing data now um blur the lines between home and work too because we're all carrying our devices and um now we're seeing pandemic when working people were working from their home computers right that they're being surveilled by the keystrokes and people were getting those house jigglers because they were afraid to go to the bathroom and have you know productive time um be recorded uh as not being productive and so I think we've seen examples of Amazon again you know the warehouse wearables um the one example I'd like to bring forward though is with a football players um who are member of our uh umbrella we actually have a Sports Council within the aflci now because of these issues um that during the pandemic um you know all the employers wanted to know the safety and health data um during the games that were being played you know during the pandemic and so the wearables were um put on steroids no pun intended um and uh the football players union negotiated parameters around who owned that data and how it could be used because they saw value in the data and so they uh bargained the ownership of that data was the players and then now they're able to actually use the data the way they see fit in terms of how they can create value um can it be used to inform a video game in its development and then the players can receive royalties you know those are the types of things that we talk about with worker ownership of data great um Cathy see just to round things out um I know you mentioned that you've worked with cortico and I I work with them as well they're great great folks uh some of my favorite technologists in the space and I'm kind of curious beyond the conversations that you facil facated what do you see as potential roles for some of these Advanced tools more systemically in supporting making worker voice more efficacious and institutionalized way uh or you know allowing representation of other stakeholders well cordico and the folks at the center for constructive communication they're just a great example of how um we can make choices about how how we incorporate technology into our lives and we can do it for the broader public good so for example if you're someone like me who's been an ethnographer for most of her career I can only take in so much right I can only drive my car around Wisconsin so much time and spends so much time with so many people but if you um create a platform in which you listen to many groups of people in many different places then it becomes an issue of how do you make sense of that in all that information right and you can you could do it just in a Brute Force automated way which which isn't ideal I don't think because there's there's so much nuance and care that one ought to put into listening to fellow human beings but you can combine tools of Technology with human sensibility to do much more listening at a at a grander scale so in my mind what it means is there is a possibility for much more listening of many more people to be going on and with care yeah that's what we in the plurality movement called broad listening as opposed to broadcast nice phrase yeah um list do you want to add something that or no I just listening I think that's so critically important okay great so uh I I won't take up too much more time um I wanted to turn to the audience if folks have questions for our distinguished panel J own yeah wonderful panel thank you everybody this is more for list but perhaps others will weigh in as well I mean I think what you have all sort of uh emphasized put slightly more broadly we've had the wrong timee of technocracy here the right type would be you know we want expertise the wrong type is some people make the decisions with globalization Financial deregulation technology disruption and then that is imposed on people without their voice so the alternative the right type of technocracy has to have voice worker voice more broader voice but then the question is does the labor movement need to change for that as well meaning are there any problems in the way that the labor movement had in approaching technology in its interplay with companies that need to change for it to be more effective in the direction of technology and how technology is used we're perfect no I know yeah no it's uh it's true and I think the reason why most Unions would be averse to technological change off on the face of it is because of just what you said we've never been at the table we've never been in the design we've never had a voice and it always is implemented to uh achieve cost savings at to add to the bottom line of the company to make workers more efficient is usually code for like we want fewer workers and we're going to work harder for Less um and so I think there's a general skepticism and disdain frankly uh because the process is so broken but uh we are starting to change that and we had this Summit at CES for that reason because we know we need to be nimble we need to be responsive and looking at our systems and how um can we be more effective and efficient uh with how even our representational models were starting to analyze um and in the bargaining process um there's uh for example Unite Here the hotel and Hospitality workers have um negotiated a notice period so that when the employer institutes technology they have to give notice to the union it started at 180 days which is quite a long time right they've since in their last rounds started shrinking that in tradeoff for more um retraining funds and way Pathways forward for uh workers who are going to be displaced by technology and are finding new jobs um so the notice period was really a trust Builder to say we're not going to just be an afterthought um so I think that's just one example of many of how we're trying to be more responsive more reactive work in Partnership where we can with employers and I'll just put a pin and we just announced a a partnership with Microsoft now people are like what uh uh but it's really to get workers in the lab abs and um you know get that uh two-way communication going but more importantly we negotiated a neutrality agreement for Union organizing because Microsoft recognizes this is the way the country is going workers want a voice if they want a union they should have one and we hope that that will be um a bellweather for other tech companies to not fear worker inclusion and worker voice but to embrace it as something that's going to be actually a net positive and a value ad one thing just to add there is that also you probably were involved that uh when we did this deal with Activision y uh we attended a lot to the labor issues and I thought that was a great piece of progress that that got brought into a major antitrust uh merger agreement so and as a result another unit within zenx once um Microsoft said they'd be neutral yeah another unit of workers wanted to organize they did and they have a first contract already so that's great yeah um just to make sure I see everyone I'm going to stand up uh yes back there yeah go ahead with the mask thank you um I had a question about broading the scope of the conversation of Labor to the global South so we've seen these labor movements rising in the US and Global North Tesla and and the noric countries battling which seems to be a pretty uh uous battle um even in the US we just had the wrer strike etc etc UPS Etc um however I'm interested in hearing what you have to say about folks who have always been kind of at the wrong end of history when it comes to work particularly in the global South I'm speaking about people who for decades now have been working really low paid jobs to annotate to moderate right uh through services like Amazon TK or if you look at all the Facebook Instagrams all the social media companies are using really low paid labor exposing workers to really hazardous conditions so if in places like the us or Scandinavia workers are struggling to find their place and work within the system what hope do we have for folks that historically have lacked any s of representation at this scale yeah this a bit gets to the question that I was pushing you on Kathy yeah um well I I mean I guess the the situation in the the global South is yeah it it it it sort of reflected in some ways in some sectors in the United States itself where people also lack these kinds of uh these kinds of protections and um basically my my my like the the the the the kinds of things that I would recommend for the global South would be similar to the kinds of things that I would recommend for the United States I mean there there's a way in which if you look at the United States compared to any other Rich democracy we tend to to forget uh or what tends to sort of fade from from from view is the the ways in which the US is a really a big outlier and in some ways you know it's an outlier in terms of sort of the the core of benefits that that you can expect it's an outlier in terms of like the whole idea that you have to organize workers workplace by workplace that's just not a thing in most of the uh of the rich democracies and so many of the problems that you're citing for the for the global South are think of the sort that that um Liz was talking about when she's talking about people working two jobs to in order to make ends meet uh in this country so in many ways the kinds of prescriptions that I would have for uh workers in the global South would be pretty similar to the ones that I have for uh for uh the UN unionized sectors in this country I speak to that briefly so I'm not an expert on the global South but this the question I think illuminates for me how important it is this theme of this is not the future is not inevitable right the the theme of the future of the work initiative that I love so much is this is all about choices that human beings make and uh this may be a little bit poana but we the global South illuminates that um Norms are an institution too and we as humans have to decide what kind of a world we want to live in and we we often times think about the global South in terms of what are the market forces that are going to change things for people there what are the choices that we make in terms of the values that we want to underpin the global economy that's going to change things for people there right what are the Norms that we want to enforce and um that may make me sound like a Pana but it's it's what I believe I think if if we want things to change in the Global Soft we have to change the way we live as humans and that labor movements are alive and well in the global sth and we work globally together um on these strategies so that um what one country is doing can uplift the next and the Baseline and fundamental core of that is worker organizing and workers coming together in their communities um you know to build these broad coalitions because as we know um in Collective action there is strength and that the labor movement's roots are in solidarity and that um this notion of bringing in Community Partners and allies and Nos and unions and um you know faith-based organizations academics all coming together to create the society that we want to see and be able to chart the course for these Technologies to help humans that's what we're supposed to be doing this for is to actually make work better make work safer make work less literally backbreaking um but we know that that's not just going to happen natur natur that we have to come together and organize to make that happen in the way in the back of blond here thank you hi my name is Alexandra I'm actually polish so we have a long history of labor unions there starting from solidarity um but my question is um maybe it's actually about the comment that the chair made uh I I was curious because I think you mentioned something about how a worker should be involved in understanding the thorough process you know not only their own tasks but actually everyone's task and understand like have a a better understanding and be better informed about what this work is generally or more more holistically about but then you mentioned something about productivity um increase and better product and I was sort of wondering if if that's what the worker representatives should be worried about because I I was thinking always that they should be focused on on the protection of of workers you know and I think maybe these two can be combined somehow but I I never thought that this would be like the goal of a worker representative to kind of uh pay attention to more productivity or increased amount of work for the workers or that we work less because the gains from that productivity are shared broadly and in theory that's kind of what we'd like to see I guess I guess the thing I I was just referring to is there's there's this guy Edward Deming who was very influential especially in Japan on the Toyota productivity system and his whole philosophy was that if workers come to holistically understand the product then they can spot in the process of their work flaws in the process and be part of innovation that workers can actually drive Innovation and that was Central to the Japanese you know productivity Miracle so that's that's what I was referring to but Kathy yeah I'll just I'll just tag on to that saying that yeah work workers of course have an interest in the success of whatever firm they're working in because otherwise they're they're they're I mean they have to have some sort of foundational um uh interest in that but their first priority is in fact I would say to to defend workers interests but those are so compatible and here's you know I have an example of the the kind of uh thing that Liz was talking about this balancing of you know safety issues with efficiency and productivity issues and it's it it comes out of a uh the case of a a Swedish Mining Company bulletin which wanted to introduce a sort of a system for being able to identify and make know exactly where workers were in in the mind and of course this could be a great safety thing it's wonderful for you know it can increase safety in case of of an accident or something but it was also very important to the company because they wanted to achieve efficiency gains because it would allow them to coordinate the activity of different miners who were you know at work in different parts of the mine so you know the union of course shared the the SA concerns they also have an interest in this in this firm doing well um but the but they were worried about surveillance and and speedups and and all the things that can come along with um the ability to track particular workers they were they were going to be outfitted with uh digital tags and basically the solution that they wound up with combined these these these concerns basically what they did was they asked the vendor or they required the vendor to produce a system that anonymized these tags um and where the only uh person that has the uh the the capacity to unlock the an animiz uh tags was the union representative so basically they got the best of both of these worlds right you got the efficiency gains that the firm was after but you also got these protections uh for the workers and that I love this example because that technology then that new sort of Union friendly version of this thing became something that the vendor was able to sell and that is now diffusing to other minds and so you know these are these kinds of examples where you get a better outcome uh by actually taking account of the uh of the interest of workers and not just the sort of easy solution or the uh the firm's version of what um what efficiency uh gains or productivity uh demand demands basically I love that example because it's very related to this data cooperatives idea that again is very big in Taiwan and other places and also as part of coro's approach to privacy so great illustration of uh thinking about that sort of collective privacy organized by uh you know someone who's can I just say one more thing on this there is a concept in in comparative political economy called beneficial constraints and the idea is basically you know managers are firms they operate in fast-moving markets they don't necessarily you know Consulting with unions is going going to slow things down it's going to it's going to force compromise and they it's not necessarily their first choice but very often these the constraints that uh that the that the need to negotiate the introduction of particular Technologies you know often that will foreclose sort of easy kind of low lowend low road kinds of strategies and force firms to be more Innovative to be more creative to be to sort of take a higher Road strategy um you know so to emphasize quality rather than just uh than just cost and I think that that's that's kind of the the idea of these Partnerships it's not something that is chosen by you know firms don't seek out they have to be required to uh to negotiate it doesn't you can't rely on sort of employer self-enlightenment it's just not going to happen in that in that particular way I think I think we need to wrap up for a little of time but thank you so much uh to the whole panel was a [Applause] great oh sorry you have 15 minutes great oh sorry sorry I I I uh I I thought we we had to end it the hour so sorry about that okay well great so time for more questions um sorry about that yeah go ahead yeah exactly we have more time I guess sorry well thanks I'm glad I get an extra question actually um no thanks for the great panel um I guess I had a question it sort of riffs off the points you all just made around sort of this whole idea of I think incentives especially for management of firms this idea that they sort of take the low road for some of these things for maybe short-term profit but it but it sort of strikes me that even you know as we think more about what is the the role of you know manager incentives and maybe corporate governance more broadly is I think about some of the examples you see you know in in places like Germany where you start to have worker representation on boards and that that can shape some of the incentives that companies have because now as we're talking about what technologies companies either go to buy or that you know maybe other developers are incentivized to build that you know I sort of wonder if maybe sort of corporate governance is one of the the key levers by which one can influence that I don't know if you all thought about that but that's something that strikes me as maybe a fruitful way to to move forward on this ticket list I mean I guess I just you know as to your previous point that um Corporate America generally doesn't do things out of benevolence right that we they need to be forced um and that's where unions have always come into play is this balancing the scales you know being um sort of an enforcement agent uh for worker protections and worker rights and over the course of time I think um unions have been perceived now to be sort of the hindrance to Innovation or oh you know it's just another step we have to go through to involve workers and but in the end it actually makes companies more productive and um better off um you know their products are better and and everyone ultimately is better off but yes in terms of corporate governance and some of the strategies that we've been using on the union side um using our pension fund Investments you know is always kind of a lever that we can do to get inside that sort of shareholder activism space to uh create those Tools of Change um and a lot around uh ESG policies of course and I always say that the E has been capitalized and the S has been sort of like lower lowercase um and we're trying to flip the script on that that now with the Advent of AI and and future of work it's more important than ever that the S take prominence and um we'll continue to do whatever we can to exercise those levers just to just to follow up on that with one little comment so there's this uh sort of counter ESG thing uh that Ronda santis has been all about he calls job security and growth and it's kind of actually interesting because I I wonder how you think about bringing in that counterweight perspective to bring in the workers perspective on corporate governance reform and so forth yeah I I mean in terms of Ronda Santos's view of what that means um we know his record and we've you know looked at the State of Florida as the essentially model for what not to do in terms of workers rights um but yeah I mean I think we're here to work with anyone who wants to work with us and that's the message all just put out there is that we want partnership we want collaboration we want to talk with some of the unusual suspects and the people that are unlikely collaborators as well as the the friends and partners that we've been working with for a long time so I'll have that conversation um one little follow up on corporate governance as well I'm curious what you with you all had a reaction to the role that workers ended up playing in the open AI leadership uh debate let's let's move that way just rallying uh rallying what you mean just rallying to to to bring him back yeah so that was a collective action by workers and I was just curious what how you all think about that I mean I don't I don't know enough about it I thought it was an example of uh Collective action right um that looked like nent unionism to me because um once workers I call them workers but you know Folks at at open AI who um you know things were working pretty well for them for for a while and and then A disruption occurs that was unexpected and then all of a sudden it's like wait a second I have rights wait a second I need a voice wait a second I need to come together with my co-workers and exercise my muscle and power and that's essentially what they did with the open letter and they were able to get the attention and the you know some prominent folks weighing back in on their behalf because they could see that the talent that made this organization Thrive was at risk and so um I would just say um it's an interesting Dynamic um and we're hoping that our Microsoft partnership actually helps in this regard because you know people don't feel free to speak up unless they have protections and you know immigration status for a lot of workers at Microsoft for example um I think they're afraid to speak up sometimes and that if they were able to unionize and have a collective voice that would make a difference so that's just one example of something we think this partnership can actually help us achieve right okay D yeah my my question is about and Kath Kathy Kathy phen reled to this the sort of structure of worker firm negotiation in the United States you know goes back to the Wagner Act of 1934 and it is like trench warfare right one establishment at a time and it leads to perverse outcomes right you know if you said I'm going to pass minimum wage laws one McDonald's a time everyone would agree that's a bad idea right that's just and and I understand this totally outside of your control this is how the law is written but I wonder if you if you're working on how this could be redone because I I my own somewhat pessimistic view is it's going to be very difficult for the labor union to really expand without a change in the structure of bargaining without more sectoral bargaining which is again what cath Kathy was alluding to where you negotiate on behalf of all the workers in industry or all the workers in occupation and so on rather than one firm at a time which says you know firms don't want to be negotiated with they'd like to do what they want but they'd like it even less when they say oh you're doing it to me but not my competitor like that's terrible for me right and one can understand that so I'm just I'm curious about how you're obviously you're aware of this how you're thinking about it and whether there's any pathway forward to change how that's done yeah and I think the we all know that labor law is badly broken and tilted away from workers and the ability to organize is essentially an act of heroism in this country people get fired they're intimidated they're harassed um and uh the law is just slow to respond because we don't have the resources and capacity um so we're going to fight for labor law reform as we always have passed the pro act when we can get a you know Congress that will side with workers but at the same time we're experimenting we are looking for new models and you know a lot of uh uh thought has been given given to sectoral approaches which unfortunately work much better in Europe because of the um underpinnings of a social safety net right we don't have that in this country so it's not an Apples to Apples comparison but approaching it in terms of sectoral thinking is something we are definitely looking at um and I would say that um the federal Investments presents a huge opportunity to do that and our Center for transformational organizing is looking at the clean energy sector for example a whole new industry and economy is emerging uh with semiconductor manufacturing and EV battery and supply chain and we have the opportunity to land with multiple unions in a sector working together to organize um and bring those standards up and we we would hope unionize the sector but at least work together to make sure that those are good jobs um that workers have a voice and and Collective power and um so that would be a sectoral approach to organizing that we think has a lot of potential yeah right there I'm I'm very glad that David asked the question about sectoral bargaining because I'm going to sort of follow up on that uh it seems like that is of course in the longer run exactly the right approach in the shorter or medium run I I don't know what the federal government is able to do in terms of passing labor law but I'm wondering two other spaces which could be potentially opened for a more democratic aspect of uh regulating and developing uh technology amongst other things uh state level and uh using as a sort of federal funding to generate spaces and in the state level for example Minnesota and California have both shown very interesting examples of the healthcare fast food levels what seal standards can do I'm wondering is there a role go for States especially larger and more you know sort of states where a lot of innovation is happening to have those type of tripy structures uh that state governments can actually play some role in creating those spaces that could help bring in more democratic form of governance and development of technology and and also what

2024-02-10 01:39

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