Unions miss chance to shape new workplace
The latest union advertising campaign depicting fearful workers and questioning the power of big business is as clever as it is dangerous.
The Australian Council of Trade Unions’ Change The Rules campaign – its largest in a decade – is clever because it taps into rising anti-business sentiment. Many viewers will relate to the ad where a tearful worker has her hours cut back.
The campaign is dangerous because it is backwards rather than forward looking. It aggressively pits human labour against capital (big business) in ways not seen since the Howard Government’s WorkChoices reforms in 2005.
More importantly, the campaign is a missed opportunity for the union movement to reinvent and reposition for the coming technology-led labour market transformation that will disrupt millions of jobs in Australia and overseas.
Rather than painting corporate Australia as greedy and anti-labour, the campaign could have positioned unions as the proactive movement helping Australian workers displaced by automation and artificial intelligence to learn new skills for new jobs.
Instead, we have a combative, reactive campaign that is a throwback to the 1980s and ‘90s.
To be clear, I am not anti-union. As we face the looming workplace revolution, unions have never been more crucial.
We need unions to protect worker rights as more people lose their jobs to technology, to support those displaced and to re-skill workers by partnering with business, government, higher education and training providers during such fundamental labour-market change.
Technology is no longer a tool to help workers; it is the worker.
Witness National Australia Bank’s move to cut a fifth of its workforce and invest in AI technologies. Telstra is another cutting jobs as business downsizes.
McKinsey Global Institute estimates 50% of current work activities can be automated with available technology. The pressing issue is not whether there will be enough jobs in the future – it’s whether today’s workers can re-skill for the new jobs being created.
Unions are missing the big picture when their memberships are shrinking to historical lows: at present only one in 10 workers in the private sector belong to a union. To be relevant, more collaboration and less confrontation is required.
As Richard Wagstaff, head of New Zealand Council of Trade Unions, said recently, “We need to move from a contest of ideas to a reservoir of ideas”.
Moreover, unions could exploit technology to help workers, as two ex-union officials have done with their WorkIT artificial intelligence chatbot. Being trialled by 100 workers at Star Casino, the AI connects workers through their smartphone to provide answers to rights, benefits and workplace issues. Such services could attract new union members that are more interested in creating value through information and service rather than simply activism.
When it arrives in full force, labour-market disruption will be exponential – it will get faster over time. Robots that replaced some workers in manufacturing and mining will do the same in construction and other traditional blue-collar sectors.
Automation will affect white-collar jobs with a high component of routine tasks and even professions such as law and accounting.
Yet we don’t hear enough from Australian unions on automation and the impact on workers. And how unions are repositioning for this megatrend.
Australia could learn much from Europe. Scandinavian unions are leading employer-financed job-security councils to help displaced workers learn new skills and transition to other jobs. Union leaders in Sweden are embracing technology as a tool to make companies more efficient and create gains for workers. As one Swedish union official said: “If we don’t move forward with the technology and making money, well, then we are out of business.”
This seems well ahead of Australian unions’ hostile approach to employers.
In the ACTU ad, the fictional worker asks why her work has been cut back when her employer is doing well. In the real world, it’s probably because the business is using new technologies to automate all or part of her job.
Unions can push an us-versus-them approach against big business all they like. But if they don’t enter the fray soon, there’ll be fewer people in work, and economic and social pain for all.
- John Barrington is co-founder of artificial intelligence company AlphaIntell.
Quite difficult to make these arguments of the corporate business community being pro-worker when we are in the middle of a banking Royal Commission and at the same time as mainstream workers watch business pitch for tax- cuts to drive productivity .... meanwhile Elon Musk has declared that human-beings are under-rated in his drive to automation for Tesla as the major challenge and mis-step in getting model 3 to market.... this is in an environment of global growth in economic disparity .... and inequality through the failure of trickle- down economic to be the biggiest socip-political challenge for governments and business. Part of me goes .... actually 'old school' union activity is exactly what is required .... otherwise we will end up with the dis-enfranchised voting in a Trump type Australian Leader.
Business Owner and HR Manager
6 年Very interesting article John, thanks for sharing. Not only is AI displacing workers, but the use of newer technologies is decreasing barriers to entry for small business and contractors - further eroding the base membership of the historically occupation and trades based union organisations.