Today is May Day - a reminder of the richness of the labour movement speaking through the struggles of the past. Many today are remembering the general strike leading up to the Haymarket Massacre, the struggle for the five-day week, or gaining rights that were not given to us, we had to take them. We are grateful to those who came before us. But as ICT unions today we face a qualitatively different challenge - what we commonly call AI and its impact on workers. Unions are the voice that is missing from this debate - it is workers who should be deciding how this technology fits into their lives. It needs to be subjected to ruthless critique from the trade union position.
We see plenty of places where employers are trying to maximise their profits at the expense of workers. Mention, for example, the tendency to replace HR’s with AI, so that a machine decides whether we are a good fit for a given company. It evaluates whether I’m the ideal candidate - not for nothing have we read some time ago about people hiding LLM traps in their CVs to recommend them. How are we supposed to feel good about the workplace if we’re not even worth evaluating?
Another phenomenon we notice is the tendency to remove junior positions - after all, replace them with a model and seniors will fix the outputs. We perceive that this is not healthy for our sector. And we know that this replacement is happening in all creative professions (from lawyers to designers to marketing to teachers). We warn companies that investing in workers is investing in the future, in the whole sector. So far, the machine can’t take responsibility for the code in production, for the “health” of the database, for the infrastructure. And we as workers say that without social change, it shouldn’t even have that responsibility.
We once published a pamphlet about data centers being the new mines. The environmental impact of artificial intelligence is becoming more and more mapped. We add that there are other overlooked impacts. In our experience, AI creates what we call bloat - suboptimal code that overflows and puts a bit more strain on our shared infrastructure. And as they say - pennies make dimes.
Employers see AI as a tool to multiply productivity at minimal cost. Universities are teaching that AI is cheaper than programmers, tools like Lovable.dev are being created that will build you a prototype (but maybe it’ll spit out fake dependencies so you can never run it). We question whether this productivity gain is what we want. For example, should we demand a shorter work week when we already get more done now than we did 30 years ago? Should we not demand an increase in wages? Should we not want to fight for our say? And shouldn’t we demand fairness with regard to these instruments and their implementation in such a way that ICT does not disintegrate before our eyes? Unions are us - all ICT workers who want a society where our voice is heard. The union is you - the person who cares what ICT looks like in our country. And you care because it affects you 40 hours a week.
Like the workers in Chicago 140 years ago, we want to improve our working conditions. So that we can decide what technology we want. We are in ICT, we are constantly learning new things - and we should have conditions according to this fact. We are in ICT, at the cutting edge of technological progress. Every technology brings a new freedom, but also a new necessity. The creation of the computer opened up incredible creativity, but also the necessity to use it across our lives. As ICT workers, we certainly do not and will not stand in the way of progress. But every new technology needs to be critically analysed and its benefits and negatives assessed, not only for capitalists but also for workers.
Today we come together to remind ourselves that the real power is within us. It is us they need in order to make a profit. It is from our surplus value that they get the means for endless growth. And we take back our voice. Join in! Organize! Together, we are free to decide how to work with AI.