PHILADELPHIA—As unions and their members move deeper into the 21st century, they face new threats of different types: Artificial intelligence, with its potential to wipe out millions of jobs, and corporate and political autocrats hellbent on controlling and oppressing workers. The threats to workers and their unions are being tackled at an international gathering of trade union leaders in Philadelphia this week.
Besides the job-destroying potential of A.I., they singled out multi-national corporations and particular countries, including the U.S., Hong Kong, Ukraine, the Philippines, the United Kingdom, and Myanmar (Burma), as nations where attacks on workers and their unions are rampant. The best way to fight those demons is international cooperation on an unprecedented scale, speakers told the opening session of the UNI Global Union Congress, meeting for four days in Philadelphia this week.
The threats were sounded in the keynote session on August 27, the only open meeting, by retiring UNI President Ruben Cortina, Service Employees President Mary Kay Henry, United Food and Commercial Workers President Marc Perrone, AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler and Senate Labor Committee Chair Bernie Sanders, Ind-Vt., in that order.
And, the speakers said unions will have to rescue the world from those threats and from growing global warming and its catastrophes, too.
Details of how to tackle those threats were left for the global congress’s next three days, which were not open to press and public. Sanders again campaigned for international cooperation on combatting global warming, just as he did in an op-ed in The Guardian the week before.
There, Sanders advocated huge cuts in military spending by the U.S. with the money transferred to defeating global warming. Sanders has tried, and failed, repeatedly to cut the U.S. military budget, now approximately $1 trillion, by 10%. The military vs. peace and democracy and human rights were subjects of one later congress session, closed, like the others, to press and public.
“We have all seen that in the extreme weather events, it’ll be the working class and the planet that suffer the most,” the senator told the delegates. That’s one story, among many, the mainstream media don’t tell, he noted earlier. In U.S. media, there are no mentions of “the working class” and “we’re all one big happy family.”
“It’ll be our job to cut carbon emissions and create millions of” renewable energy “jobs that make our economies and our plant stronger, not weaker,” Sanders declared.
Other closed sessions included: Using collective bargaining to enhance women’s power in the workplace, holding corporations accountable, changing the rules to create a just economy, “rising together against inequality, racism and discrimination” and for health and safety on the job, and “decent work in a digital age.”
Before the delegates from 150 nations tackled the problems, they received a message of welcome and thanks from the White House, via Facebook. Repeating themes he’s taken on the campaign trail, President Biden’s letter to UNI touted unions’ success in creating the middle class worldwide—as well as in the U.S.—and “leveling the playing field.
“In combating hate, racism and discrimination, you’ve made it clear the fight for economic justice requires social justice as well,” the president stated.
UNI President Cortina declared, “There must be no more first, second or third worlds. We must leave behind all forms of patriarchy, gender violence and of course, income inequality.” But Cortina also warned, quoting fellow Argentinian Pope Francis I, that the world “is entering a new Cold War.”
The AFL-CIO’s Shuler had some choice words about the right-wing threat to unions and democracy.
“We are facing the same forces of greed, inequality and existential threats to our futures,” in both jobs and politics, she warned. She later added “xenophobia and racism” to the mix.
Given the right-wing’s spreading clout worldwide, Shuler declared “We have to defend our rights as workers and as human beings.”
Democracy “is not guaranteed all around the globe, not even in the U.S.,” she declared, before reeling off a list of other nations where democracy, human rights and worker rights are under attack. The others Shuler mentioned were Hong Kong, Myanmar (Burma), the Philippines, and the United Kingdom, where the Tory government schemed to curtail the right to strike, and Ukraine.
Sanders, who received the most rousing reception from the 1,500 delegates and dozens more invited guests, also tackled, like Shuler, the issue of the future of democracy. She concentrated more, however, on the artificial intelligence threat, and told People’s World later it is the top priority of the new AFL-CIO institute she established.
Sanders said he did not have enough information to discuss the situation in other nations, so he concentrated on diminishing democracy in the U.S. He didn’t name names—neither politicians, parties nor corporate pooh-bahs. But his targets were obvious: The capitalist class and the rich.
“Billionaires contribute millions” to political SuperPACs to elect or defeat whomever they want, Sanders told the crowd. “They buy and sell politicians.
“In my judgement, change here in the U.S. is going to come because respect and support for the establishment is getting weaker and weaker,” he explained. “What kind of change will it be?
“Will it be change that pits one group against another? Will it be change based on bigotry? Will it be change that soon leads to authoritarianism?
“Or will it be change based on the principles of international solidarity and based on the principles of economic and social justice? I know which side I’m on and I know which side you’re on.”
Henry introduced another linkage involving corporate America, race. “Corporate control cannot be split from the structural racism that built America for rich, white people at the expense of everyone else,” Henry said.
Henry was also the sole speaker to mention the current symbol of right-wing autocracy plans: Former Republican Oval Office occupant Donald Trump, who again seeks the White House.
“We face an increasingly ugly hostile white nationalist right wing,” Henry declared. “Damage of the Trump years still has to be undone. But we are not going to succumb to anti-worker attacks or accept the status quo that keeps generations of workers down.”
Shuler concentrated more than the others on the artificial intelligence threat, brought to the fore by the forced strikes of SAG-AFTRA and the Writers Guild of America against the Hollywood studios, TV networks and streaming video services.
The bosses of those writers and performers want to use AI to create one image and voice of a performer, say, and computerize-copy it and use it over and over and over again forever. That would deprive the performers of both additional paydays on the job and of future payments for their names, images and likenesses.
The writers would suffer a similar fate, with their dialogues, again being created on only one day, computerized and transformed without their knowledge or consent, and without being paid, either.
“If AI can strike at the job prospects of “our creatives”–performers of SAG-AFTRA and script creators of the Writers Guild of America—“then how about the rest of us?”
“We have the rise of artificial intelligence, used by executives as a threat to basic human rights” as well as to workers’ jobs. But unions are gaining and so is worker militancy, Shuler added. “There have been 200 strikes in the U.S. this year so far, ten times the number two years ago.
“We’re rising up against companies—Starbucks, Amazon, Trader Joe’s,” and the Hollywood studios. “And we have the support of the public, while people, especially young people, now see the power of collective action.”
One big goal of collective action will be to give workers a seat at the table when the corporate class decides on how, whether and when to apply artificial intelligence to company operations and to workers’ jobs. “We have to be involved not just at the end,” where AI is inflicted on workers by the corporate class “but at the beginning” in deciding how, or if, to use it.
For ways to combat corporate exploitation of AI against workers, the AFL-CIO is looking towards UNI in general and European unions in particular for ideas and methods.
The AI peril doesn’t just apply to the Writers Guild and SAG-AFTRA, she warned. Though Shuler did not say so, the AFL-CIO’s own Executive Pay Watch showed the highest-paid corporate CEO whose firm uses AI the most, converting most of its system to automated transactions, is Hertz (Global) Rent-A-Car, which is non-union.
“We are going to make sure that every worker has a say on how artificial intelligence shapes our jobs,” Shuler declared, without getting into specifics. Workers “are overwhelmingly concerned about this existential fight. The idea that a performer could have their image” and their voices “used and manipulated by executives terrifies them.”
As they should be, federation Secretary-Treasurer Fred Redmond said when the fed released the Paywatch report. He estimated AI could threaten or make redundant half of the jobs in the U.S.
Shuler had some choice words about the right-wing threat to unions and democracy.
“We are facing the same forces of greed, inequality and existential threats to our futures,” in both jobs and politics, she warned. She later added “xenophobia and racism” to the mix.
Given the right-wing’s spreading clout worldwide, Shuler declared “We have to defend our rights as workers and as human beings.”
Democracy “is not guaranteed all around the globe, not even in the U.S.,” she declared, before reeling off a list of other nations where democracy, human rights and worker rights are under attack. The others Shuler mentioned were Hong Kong, Myanmar (Burma), the Philippines and the United Kingdom, where the Tory government schemed to curtail the right to strike, and the Ukraine.
Even UFCW’s Perrone touched on both the political and artificial intelligence threats. “Inequality, division and dysfunction and the threat of AI are forcing more and more workers to wake up,” he said.
Retiring UNI President Cortina, an Argentinian union leader, took time out at the end of his speech to praise past and present Latin American worker and political heroes in the fight against autocracy.
“It has been a pride to represent them at the highest level,” as UNI chief, Cortina said in Spanish. Upon ascending to the post, “In 2018 I remembered those who would always be on my mind during my presidency: Allende, Lula and Perón and Evita among others and others, and much more, the five million suffering workers affiliated to UNI,” he said. “I hope I have risen to the occasion.”
Lula is the incumbent Brazilian president, Luis Ignacio “Lula” da Silva, long-time industrial unionist and head of the Workers Party. Juan Perón and Evita—his wife–were presidents of Argentina. And Marxist Chilean President Salvador Allende was overthrown by a military coup engineered by the Republican Richard Nixon administration and the U.S. CIA.
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