The AFL-CIO Commission on the Future of Work

The AFL-CIO Commission on the Future of Work

The AFL-CIO Commission on the Future of Work

In response to these longstanding trends and emerging challenges, the AFL-CIO launched the Commission on the Future of Work and Unions (Commission on the Future of Work) at the 2017 national convention in St. Louis, Missouri, to address the “profound changes [technology] is driving, [and its] potential for creating better lives, but only if working people are able to shape the change that is coming.”²⁵ The convention unanimously supported the commission resolution that noted: “The failure of progressive forces, including the labor movement, to nimbly confront these seismic changes must be addressed.”²⁶

The Commission on the Future of Work put workers and worker organizations at the center of the discussion of the technological transformations that were reshaping workplaces, the relationships between workers and employers, the centers of corporate power, and the economy. Workers are an essential voice in the conversation about the future of work, but their voices have been conspicuously absent from the discussions. The business community,²⁷ corporate consultants,²⁸ think tanks,²⁹ and many universities³⁰ have long been discussing the impact of technical change on work and the workforce, but largely without any worker voices. For too many thought leaders engaging in these conversations, the technological future was something to be imposed on workers not shaped by or built with workers.

The AFL-CIO Commission on the Future of Work was anchored by ten sectoral and constituency subcommittees led by affiliated and national unions that engaged academic and policy experts in labor and industrial relations to “rethink ways of building bargaining power and providing economic security for millions of Americans.”³¹ The deliberative, multiyear process culminated in the “Future of Work and Unions” report that provided a roadmap to build worker power to confront the technological forces trying to wrest control of the economy to the detriment of workers.³² Most of the so-called futurist technological wonders just represented new facets of the same anti-worker approaches threatening the labor movement for decades—outsourcing and fissuring, globalization and offshoring, union-busting, and financialization.

The report and the commission also called for the creation of the AFL-CIO Technology Institute to shape the future of work to ensure that the benefits of emerging technologies benefit workers and people and are not captured by Big Tech and big corporations.

Building a Hub for Expertise on How Technology Impacts Workers and Unions

In 2021, the Tech Institute was launched to leverage the power of innovation and technology to strengthen the labor movement. AFL-CIO president Liz Shuler described the Tech Institute as “a hub for skills and knowledge to help labor reach the next frontier, grow and deploy our bargaining power, and make sure the benefits of technology create prosperity and security for everyone, not just the wealthy and powerful.” ³³

The Tech Institute has already begun its mission to build a hub for innovation and technology expertise, develop cutting-edge public policies to embed workers and unions in government innovation policies, collaborate with institutes and universities to incubate worker-driven technologies that assist and empower workers rather than replace them, and amplify labor power through new organizing and bargaining strategies in collaboration with front-line workers’ unions.

The goal is to build a comprehensive knowledge center to understand the granular mechanisms of how technology impacts the workplace and workers. The Tech Institute will be a resource center for unions in the United States but also part of the global network of workeroriented strategic development on technology issues by building intellectual capacity and by convening the phenomenal talent across the labor movement and other public interest and academic experts who are considering the thorny issues of big data, artificial intelligence, and digital privacy in the workplace.

Developing a Cohesive Technology Policy Approach to Innovation and Technology

The Tech Institute is actively engaging to embed labor into the decision-making tables that direct federal innovation policy and public research investments to build lasting structures and relationships that prioritize making technology work for working people. The Tech Institute aims to give workers a meaningful voice in how technology is developed and implemented—just like what the tech companies have done for decades.

The biggest tech companies have had dominant roles directing federal research priorities and enriching themselves by commercializing these technologies. Many critical innovations that later were profitably commercialized, such as smartphones and even Google, were launched or built with government research grants.³⁴ The federal government invests nearly $160 billion a year in university research—representing nearly half of all US spending on basic research and one-third of the money spent on applied research.³⁵ In some instances, workers’ tax dollars are funding their own demise as federally funded research projects are commercialized overseas rather than creating US jobs.

Today’s e-commerce giants are a great example. It took decades of government research funding into institutes, universities, and government agencies to develop the technologies and networks that became the Internet.³⁶ Commercial interests began offering private Internet network services in the early 1990s—after thirty years of federal funding had developed and demonstrated the Internet’s value.³⁷ The federal government spent another $47 billion to expand broadband in rural areas before 2020 and another $65 billion in broadband funding was included in the Biden infrastructure bill.³⁸ All of these federal investments helped build the tools and connect customers to enrich e-commerce commerce.

But unlike union workers, some of the biggest tech companies are paying far less than their fair share of taxes. Amazon’s effective tax rate has been far short of the 21 percent federal tax imposed on corporate income. Amazon paid no federal corporate income taxes in 2017 and 2018; it paid only 1.2 percent of pretax income in 2019; and it paid 7 percent in 2020, when it reaped record $24 billion in pretax income.³⁹ Amazon founder Jeff Bezos paid less than 1 percent taxes on his $4.22 billion in reported income from 2014 to 2018 according to an investigation by ProPublica. ⁴⁰ The ability of tech giants to hoard profits while working people struggle to stay afloat exacerbates America’s yawning income and wealth inequality. In 2020, Amazon CEO Andy Jassey earned $35.8 million, over twelve hundred times more than the typical Amazon worker, who made $29,000—making the Amazon CEO–worker pay ratio nearly double the national average, according to an AFL-CIO analysis from Executive Paywatch.⁴¹

The labor movement must be baked into the federal innovation infrastructure to ensure that the fruits of federally funded research are shared widely and create good US jobs. No president since Franklin D. Roosevelt has supported organized labor in word and in deed more than Joe Biden. But the technocratic levers of power in the byzantine scientific and research agencies have been primarily engaged with businesses and universities and have not been acculturated or equipped to consider the interests of workers. The Tech Institute is capitalizing on the political moment to advance the labor movement’s interests in shaping innovation policy and funding to demand what workers and unions deserve.

The Tech Institute is pushing to prioritize labor unions and worker voices in the innovation ecosystem to ensure that public research money delivers good, union jobs in the United States. In 2022, a legislative effort to strengthen public research in innovation industries specifically names labor unions as stakeholders in new agency bodies to weave worker interests into the fabric of innovation research funding and governance.⁴² It includes labor union participation in a new National Science Foundation (NSF) directorate to develop funded university-labor union partnerships and directs all NSF programs to “incorporate a worker perspective.”⁴³

This federal research legislation is only part of the effort to incorporate labor voices in the federal innovation agencies and federal economic development architecture. The NSF bestows billions of dollars in research grants but so do other federal agencies such as the Department of Commerce, the Department of Transportation, the Department of Energy, and others that also have considerable research grant budgets. The Tech Institute is working to include domestic jobcreation requirements and labor union participation with these agencies as well.

Additionally, the Tech Institute is working to engage the labor movement in economic development initiatives funded by the American Rescue Plan designed to build regional innovation hubs across the country.⁴⁴ These grants are intended to build high-tech clusters and direct grant applicants to solicit participation from state and local labor unions as well as universities, governments, and businesses.⁴⁵

The policy levers are critical. As President Shuler noted, “If we put the right policy guardrails in place, we’ll actually have a higher quality of life and more time with our families, if the prosperity from all this technology and the wealth it creates is shared broadly.” ⁴⁶

Building Worker-Centered Innovation Partnerships to Shape the Future of Workplace Technology

The Tech Institute is investing in a deeper understanding of emerging technologies, the research development ecosystem, and creating a structure to build strategies to address these emerging challenges facing workers. Former AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka described the approach as “breaking up the system that has Big Tech and corporate America exerting way too much power over how and why we innovate, with no consideration of workers’ needs.”⁴⁷

The Tech Institute is partnering with prestigious research universities to incubate workercentered innovations for the future of work. Innovation grows from people with experience and knowledge that can improve how work gets done. Workers bring the accumulated expertise of actually performing the tasks and unique insights into the needs and deployment of new technologies.

But most often, university and corporate research elites with engineering and business school degrees impose new technological “solutions” on workers without soliciting their needs, capacities, and specialized workplace expertise that could build better mousetraps. People working on the front lines of jobs can be and should be engaged in the definition of workplace knowledge because involving the worker end users makes the technologies more intuitive and more effective.

The Tech Institute has developed closer relations between unions and universities, including Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), to develop technology in real time to bring workers into engineering laboratories to collaborate on the design and implementation of innovation.⁴⁸ CMU recognized that it was important to humanize their engineering and research programs to do more than innovate new technologies and launch new enterprises. The university also must recognize the role of workers and the impact on local economies and jobs.⁴⁹ Too much innovation was being developed at US universities but the intellectual property was creating jobs overseas rather than bolstering the domestic technology and manufacturing sector—a problem thrown into sharp clarity by the recent supply-chain meltdowns.

One of the first initiatives was to evaluate the future of autonomous vehicle transit technologies. The “what’s human about work” project joined the Tech Institute, the Transport Workers Union, and Amalgamated Transit Union to share transit-operator expertise with the engineering and public policy professors who wanted to better understand what bus operators do on the job.⁵⁰ Bus operators are first responders who cope with medical and safety emergencies; navigators who deal with weather, traffic, and road emergencies; and caretakers who assist older passengers and those with disabilities to ensure that transit is accessible, and more. In 2022 CMU released a white paper that concluded that no self-driving transit bus could perform the essential tasks that require the quick responses of human operators to safeguard passengers and keep the transit system functioning.⁵¹

Another CMU-union project focused on the impact of algorithmic management and other technology in the hospitality industry, partnering with the nation’s largest hospitality union, UNITE HERE, and other universities. For example, a Marriott housekeeping app that assigned rooms for workers to clean often directed them to spend time inefficiently moving from floor to floor cleaning some rooms but bypassing nearby dirty rooms, causing workers to worry that they would be disciplined for not completing their tasks.⁵² The National Science Foundation funded a CMU-UNITE HERE research project to develop worker-centered prototypes to preserve jobs, improve job quality and satisfaction, reduce technology-accelerating economic inequality, and highlight the lack of worker voices in the rush to adopt automation in the hospitality industry.⁵³ UNITE HERE president D. Taylor explained CMU’s worker-centered approach: “Most people who develop technology for the service sector don’t feel a need to engage with the people who use their products. We’ve found that CMU researchers take the voices of housekeepers, servers and other service sector workers seriously and are willing to engage with their concerns.”⁵⁴

These projects demonstrated the importance and utility of bringing workers into the innovation development process to share worker experiences with engineers that show that someone with a good-paying job is necessary even to implement next-generation technologies and that these workers have a role to play in developing new workplace technologies.

Leveraging Capacity for Unions and Workers to Address Technology and Build Power through Bargaining, Training, and Workplace Policy

The Tech Institute is a hub for workers and unions to build power to confront the Big Tech companies and the emerging workplace technology issues such as electronic surveillance and algorithmic management that can upend workers’ lives and economic security. Unions and allied worker organizations have the structural power and worker-centered vision to confront these treacherous and arcane technological waters. The Tech Institute has a systemic approach and methodology to bring technology expertise to inform union strategies on organizing, bargaining, workplace policy, training, and workforce development.

This is an exciting moment in the labor movement. Although union membership has hovered just above 10 percent of the workforce for the past few years,⁵⁵ the number of workplaces where workers are trying to form unions rose 57 percent during the first half of 2022.⁵⁶ More than 80,000 workers at the largest employers (more than 1,000 workers) initiated work stoppages in 2021 and Cornell’s ILR Worker Institute estimated the total number of workers involved in stoppages reached 140,000 workers, including high-profile strikes at John Deere and Kellogg’s.⁵⁷

Public support for labor unions has surged in the past few years, with more than two-thirds of Americans approving of labor unions in 2021, according to a Gallup survey, the highest level of support since 1965.⁵⁸ And three out of five people think that the decline in union membership has been bad for the country and for working people according to a recent Pew poll.⁵⁹

Big Tech companies have been hostile to the labor movement even as they exert an increasing sway over the economy. Intel’s founder stated that “remaining nonunion is essential for survival.”⁶⁰ The biggest tech companies—Amazon, Alphabet, Apple, Meta (Facebook)—are all non-union employers.⁶¹ Amazon is the second largest employer (behind Walmart) with 950,000 US employees and thousands more contract drivers that service its Prime deliveries.⁶² Amazon warehouse workers in Staten Island, New York, recently won the first union vote in the company’s history and another contested vote is being retabulated after allegations of illegal interference at a warehouse in Alabama.⁶³ Even at Google, tech workers formed the Alphabet Workers Union in affiliation with the Communication Workers of America (CWA) that is creating a venue for worker activism at the tech giant.⁶⁴ In June 2022, CWA secured a labor neutrality agreement with Microsoft covering workers at Activision Blizzard, workers at the first Apple store voted to unionize in Maryland in affiliation with the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, and CWA backed a union drive at an Apple store in New York City.⁶⁵

It isn’t simply the direct employees that need representation. There are a myriad of bus drivers, security guards, and cafeteria workers, as well as content moderators and other tech workers who work for subcontractors at the Big Tech companies, and building a fair economy means sharing the wealth these companies generate with everyone who works to make the companies successful. As President Shuler wrote in a letter to the New York Times, “Unions are for everyone, in every field. That’s why the labor movement is working to organize Big Tech and fighting for a fair and equitable future of work, in every sector.”⁶⁶

Unions and workers have much at stake that requires cross-sectoral and multipronged strategies. That includes building union working groups to address artificial intelligence, algorithmic management, digital trade issues, employment policy, and next-generation automation in the workplace and building new policy, organizing, and bargaining strategies to stand up for workers. The Tech Institute’s executive director, Amanda Ballantyne, was named to the National Artificial Intelligence Advisory Committee in 2022.⁶⁷ Already, the Tech Institute is working with universities to develop technology tools to build organizing capacity, strategy, and power.⁶⁸ The relationships the Tech Institute has fostered with engineering departments is germinating new projects to build worker organizing technology tools to bolster and strengthen unionization drives

The Tech Institute is also beginning to build capacity to help member unions sharpen negotiations over the adoption of technologies in the workplace and ultimately have the ability to provide real-time guidance for unions during negotiations. Most bargaining has been over the effects of technologies (the impacts on job security or benefits) but not bargaining over the adoption of worker-assistive (not replacement) technologies—what technology, the manner it is implemented, how it is used, and who has control over the data.

Some strategies have already begun. In 2018 and 2019, UNITE HERE secured agreements with hotel, casino, and food service employers that require advanced notification and negotiation over the implementation of new technologies.⁶⁹ The Las Vegas–based UNITE HERE affiliated Culinary Union secretary-treasurer Geoconda Argüello-Kline stated that the Las Vegas version of the agreements included “innovative automation and technology language, which set clear goals for worker retention, job training, advance notice of implementation, and severance package based on years of service if workers are laid off.”⁷⁰ These are thought to be some of the first contract agreements that cover technologies such as algorithmic management and workplace software and provide a starting point for the future of collective bargaining over the adoption of new technologies in the workplace.