A once-in-a-generation convergence of technology and pressure to operate more efficiently has corporations saying many lost jobs may never return.
The ILA will not work a container ship without a crew aboard. Already one company developing these automated ships also plans for automated loading and unloading of cargo from these crew-less ships without workers.
Technology doesn’t have to exploit workers, it doesn’t have to mean robots are coming for all of our jobs. These are not inevitable outcomes, they are human decisions, and they are almost always made by people driven by a profit motive.
To maintain productivity and safety, some jobs are installing robot coworkers. Labor unions worry that the robots will continue to occupy jobs after the pandemic ends while others say they will free up workers for other positions.
Neither political party has truly addressed the issue of economic security, which is why the country remains a house divided against itself.
The ILWU was fined $93.6 million over a labor dispute in Oregon, a sum which could bankrupt the union. Union President Adams explains that the ILWU will fight the judgement in court and will continue to defend its members, no matter the outcome.
This holiday season, Amazon will move millions of packages at dizzying speed. Internal injury reports suggest all that convenience is coming at the expense of worker safety.
All that surveillance is used to exert greater management control over workers, drilling them on their choices and how they spend every second.
On picket lines around the country, from Wyoming, Michigan to Rochester, N.Y. to Langhorne, Pennsylvania ---G.M. workers made the strike their own.
Their fight is one that all of us, regardless of the work we do, should claim as our own.
Fascism may be resurging, but so is socialism. Yet what would a genuine post-scarcity, egalitarian, democratic, communist society look like? The author thinks he knows, offering tantalizing if evanescent glimpses that tweak the imagination.
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