Conclusion
Digitization and technological innovations is profoundly altering our lives and our workplaces. These changes can present real benefits but also can pose genuine threats that exacerbate the racial and economic inequality and political polarization. Workers and unions must have a meaningful voice in the development and deployment of technologies that impact the quality and security of more and more jobs. Today, the Big Tech companies often collaborate with publicly funded research institutions to impose new technologies on workers without their input or consent.
Workers often lose out while tech titans reap rewards. The pandemic has highlighted the yawning economic inequality exacerbated by technology for workers—some telecommuting by video conference but millions of essential workers toiling harder, vulnerable to infection, and increasingly monitored and directed by computer systems. And these impacts fall heaviest on lowwage workers and Black, Latinx, and Native workers who have long faced occupational segregation and discrimination.
This has to change. The AFL-CIO Technology Institute injects union and worker voices into the policy maelstrom and confronts the Big Tech monopoly power over people’s lives. We need to craft a future that delivers the economic and social benefits of technology more justly and equitably and puts workers and people at the forefront rather than at the end of the line. Workers and labor unions must be partners with companies and regulators to shape a future that benefits everyone, the same way the labor movement has helped workers navigate economic dislocation for more than the past century.
Table of Contents
- Confronting the Technological Challenges Upending Workers’ Lives
- The AFL-CIO Commission on the Future of Work
- Conclusion
- Notes