Confronting the Technological Challenges Upending Workers’ Lives

Confronting the Technological Challenges Upending Workers’ Lives

Confronting the Technological Challenges Upending Workers’ Lives

Technological change has affected work and workers since before the Industrial Revolution. The advent of the plow changed farming and the invention of the printing press eliminated manuscript scribes. But today, the speed and scope of disruptive changes confront workers and unions in profound ways. These evolving technologies are not—as some corporate voices would have us believe—solely about their ingenuity; rather, innovation is being supercharged by public research directed by companies that reap the profits from taxpayer investments.³ Digitization includes manifestations of long-standing problems for workers (automation-driven job loss, deskilling, and the explosion of contract and “gig” work that has fissured the relationships between workers and employers) and emerging impacts (such as more sophisticated workplace surveillance and algorithmic management).

Technology in the Workplace

Technology-driven worker replacement has been a persistent concern for generations. The telephone industry’s transition from manual operators to mechanical switching in the 1920s to 1940s eliminated half the telephone operator jobs, and while younger women shifted to comparably paying clerical, retail, and restaurant jobs, more senior workers either left the workforce or took lower-paying jobs.⁴ The rise in office computers, word processing software, and advanced photocopying displaced a hundred thousand clerical, secretarial, and stenographic jobs in the early 1980s, and by the end of the decade the share of these workers in the economy declined for the first time in the twentieth century.⁵ Now, the proposed adoption of autonomous vehicles could eliminate hundreds of thousands of higher-paying jobs annually.⁶ It all depends on whether workers are involved in the decisions about how or whether these technologies are implemented.

Automation does not always replace workers. The rise of automated teller machines did not eliminate bank tellers, as banks opened more branches, but it narrowed the tasks these workers performed.⁷ These new technologies instead molded workers into becoming effective inputs for the new technology. This has deskilled the workforce by transforming workers into cogs that accommodate the new technology or systems, reducing the skill set required, the wages paid, and the worker autonomy, job satisfaction, and dignity.⁸ Burger-flipping robots still require human workers to do very specific tasks (putting the patty onto the robot spatula and putting the buns in a certain way). ⁹ Fast-food fry cooks were converted into robot-servicing drones. In the passengertransport sector some autonomous technology developers want to convert skilled, licensed drivers into “monitors’’ while the vehicle drives itself. This deskilling makes it easier for employers to fire workers because each worker has a smaller skill set, making them more easily replaceable, which makes workers more vulnerable to being terminated.

Technology and the Structure of Work

Technology has expanded the fissuring of workplace relationships, where employers outsource or subcontract workers without maintaining an employment relationship. One-fifth of US workers toil in fissured workplaces where companies have outsourced their workforces to subcontractors or converted their workforce into independent contractors that receive low-pay, no or paltry benefits, none of the labor law protections that employees receive, and no right to form unions.¹⁰ This has been happening for decades, but the rise of the platform “gig workers” has created a sea of ride-hail and delivery drivers, home health aides, data processors, and other workers directed by smartphone apps who are routinely misclassified as “independent contractors” and do not get the protections they justly deserve as employees.¹¹

There also are emerging workplace technology issues such as algorithmic management and workplace surveillance that can profoundly change the employment experience, with negative effects on workers. Employers are increasingly using algorithmic-driven analysis and predictive software to hire, control, assign, evaluate, and discipline workers. A 2021 review found that more than 90 percent of algorithmic management studies reported negative impacts on workers, including deskilling, lower worker autonomy, increased workplace control, heightened work intensity, and job insecurity.¹²

For example, a pilot program that used artificial intelligence to identify hospital patients susceptible to dangerous sepsis infections required nurses to develop new skilled approaches to navigate professional hierarchies and implement new workaround procedures and to develop other soft social skills to cajole physicians to act on the new infection-monitoring technology.¹³ Other algorithmic management software can rate and even terminate workers using secret, black-box formulas.¹⁴ Teachers are increasingly evaluated on how students perform on standardized tests compared to their expected performance on the basis of predictive computer analytics. Teachers could be rewarded, disciplined, even fired by proprietary algorithmic assessments that could be based on incorrect data points (classes teachers had not taught) or software code glitches— decisions that school administrators cannot explain or justify because even they did not know how the systems worked.¹⁵

Technology, Markets, and the Economy

These innovations are controlled largely by an oligopoly of Big Tech companies that flex their excess market power to capture data and economic value. These firms have secured their market dominance through mergers that have built almost insurmountable dominance. A 2020 House Judiciary Committee report highlighted how lax antitrust enforcement allowed the Big Tech companies to snap up hundreds of firms over the past decade to neutralize potential rivals or expand their market dominance.¹⁶ Facebook bought its social media rival Instagram in 2012,¹⁷ Google bought the digital ad platform DoubleClick in 2007,¹⁸ and Amazon bought the e-commerce shoe giant Zappos in 2009.¹⁹

Today, these powerhouses have a stranglehold on the digital economy. Google alone controls an estimated 90 percent of Internet search, 60 percent of Internet browsers, 70 percent of global smartphone operating systems, owns YouTube and Gmail, and generates $150 billion in web advertising revenue.²⁰ The three biggest cloud computing companies—Amazon Web Services, Microsoft’s Azure, and Google Cloud—controlled two-thirds (64 percent) of the $178 billion cloud market in 2021.²¹ Amazon dominates US e-commerce sales with nearly 60 percent of the market—ten times larger than the next-closest rival, WalMart.²² Meta’s social media apps (Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram) with 6.4 billion active users swamp the next biggest social media site, Google’s YouTube, with over 2.5 billion users.²³

The prize of this market dominance is data that fuels marketing and software services and big data tools the companies sell to advertisers and employers. Every mouse click, e-commerce purchase, Internet search, social media post, smartphone app, and, increasingly, workplace surveillance and algorithmic productivity metric is captured and commodified by the Big Tech behemoths. As a 2020 Brookings Institution essay observed, “the collection and hoarding of the digital data . . . is the 21st century equivalent of Rockefeller’s 20th century monopoly over oil.”²⁴