American workers v technological progress: the battle heats up
For more than 200 years Luddites have received bad press—worse even than the British Members of Parliament who voted in 1812 to put to death convicted machine-breakers. Yet even at the time, the aggrieved weavers won popular sympathy, including that of Lord Byron. In an “Ode to Framers of the Frame Bill” the poet wrote: “Some folks for certain have thought it was shocking/ When Famine appeals, and when Poverty groans/ That life should be valued at less than a stocking/ And breaking of frames lead to breaking of bones.” He used his maiden speech in the House of Lords to urge for a mixture of “conciliation and firmness” in dealing with the mob, rather than lopping off its “superfluous heads.”
Once again, technological upheaval is rife and there is a widespread feeling, even among the patrician classes, that the old ways are in danger of being trampled under foot by the march of progress. In America two big labour disputes—one looming, the other well under way—are, among other things, grappling with potentially seismic transformations caused by decarbonisation and artificial intelligence (AI).
The United Auto Workers (UAW) union, representing employees of Ford, General Motors and Stellantis (maker of Chrysler and Fiat), is threatening a strike when labour contracts end on September 14th. As well as fighting for sharply higher pay, one of its goals is to extend wages and other benefits offered in conventional car manufacturing to people working on electric vehicles (EVs), the production of which typically uses more robots and fewer blue-collar workers. Over in Hollywood, writers and actors are at an impasse with studios over pay and conditions in the streaming era, a dispute that has been muddied by the vexing question of how AI will reshape the industry if new tools can be used to write scripts or simulate actors. Such struggles may well shape how workers in other industries view the…
2023-08-15 10:19:17
Original from www.economist.com
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