Hello everyone, my name is Alex Ahmed, and I am here at alt.CHI to ask, who owns the future of
work?
In other words, who funds and stands to benefit from research on technology and labor?
Please find a copy of the slides, speaker notes, transcript, PDF of the paper, and other
links at bit.ly/ahmed-future-of-work.
Now what do I hope to get at by asking ‘Who owns the future of work’?
I’ll begin by emphasizing that this is not an attempt to make researchers feel guilty
or bad for taking money from the NSF or other funders —even though I am about to describe
them as fundamentally conservative, right wing, and an enemy to workers.
Instead, I want us to interrogate the underlying ideologies of these funders.
Unchallenged, these ideological currents will sweep us on a path serving powerful and moneyed
interests, despite the fact that so much research on “the future of work” is ostensibly
performed in the interests of working people.
Actually, though, it is only through collective organizing that we can change the trajectory
of the future to serve our own interests.Here I am focusing on the definitions of the “future
of work” held by those with capital (money and holdings and power) because they inevitably
affect the definitions that we hold ourselves, as well as the work we are encouraged to pursue.
I focus on two funders, the United States National Science Foundation, and WorkRise
institute, though there are many others, especially those that are active outside the United States.
Let’s begin with the NSF.
This is a recorded message from Fay Cook, the NSF’s assistant director for social,
behavioral and economic sciences.
Here, she talks about the future of work funding program, and what it aims to accomplish.
“Today, we have a unique opportunity to actively shape that future, to use technology
to improve the quality of work, and ultimately to increase productivity and economic growth.”
Cook tells us that the value of research proposals submitted to the Future of Work program will
ultimately be judged by whether and how they perpetuate
already existing economic relationships.
We can confirm that this is true by taking a look at some of the program’s funded projects,
which often aim to create technologies that surveil and track workers’ activities,
and to increase their job duties.
Furthermore, projects are framed in a way that advances specific
technology “solutions” prior to bringing ideas to workers (if workers are consulted
at all).
So while the NSF frames its funding opportunities as gestures toward a techno-utopian future,
think tanks like the WorkRise seem to be concerned with more specific and immediate problems:
income inequality, lack of opportunities for upward mobility, and low wages for Black workers
and workers of color.
It would, of course, be admirable to push for change on these issues, but in writing
this paper I was struck by the fact that workrise is funded by large financial and retail corporations,
including MasterCard, Walmart, and General Motors despite having these ostensibly proressive goals
Adding to the confusion, WorkRise’s board members include: Michael Strain, a right-wing
conservative with the American Enterprise Institute; Bill Dirksen, a former Vice President
Ford Motor Company; and David Rolf, who, despite being a union leader, has collaborated directly with
the CEO of Uber.
So why is this happening?
Is it that these corporations really have the best interests of workers at heart?
I argue that that’s clearly not true.
This slide shows three examples of WorkRise’s funders and board members engaging in anti-union
activity, just from the past few months — but these are connected to long histories of anti
worker abuse and surveillance.
A Newsweek article from December showed how Walmart uses surveillance technology to bust
unions.
A post from the worker advocacy group More Perfect Union wrote that despite strong growth
in wages last year, Walmart has refused to raise wages above 12 dollars an hour, which
is not enough to live.
Finally, WorkRise board member Michael Strain put out a paper in the right-wing, corporate
funded think tank National Bureau of Economic Research, with the dystopian title, “how
important are minimum wage increases in increasing the wages of minimum wage workers?”
The function of this paper is to argue against minimum wage increases, suggesting that workers
who remain at the same job will simply “get a raise” regardless of changes to the law.
Apparently, we are meant to just trust in the benevolence of business owners to grant
raises, rather than compel to them to change.
The reality is that corporations ultimately benefit from the ideologies perpetuated through
the scholarship + research they fund — otherwise, they would not fund it.
In this case, they benefit when we collectively accept the idea that positive social change
is given to us from the top down, rather than created from the bottom-up, from workers organizing
independently and in opposition to the bosses.
In other words, it looks like this.
This is an image of workers at General Motors in Flint Michigan.
These assembly plant workers create automobiles, and 48,000 of them shut it down in 2019 to
protest low pay and rising healthcare costs.
In an especially cruel move, GM threatened to cut off healthcare for its workers right
after the strike started; they backed off after resistance from the union.
This is just one example of many I could show, but the takeaway here is that in order to
create lasting structural change in our workplaces, we must organize.
Organizing a union is often framed as “adversarial” rather than “collaborative” or “civil”.
But in fact, workers coming together in a democratic fashion to collectively determine
our future is the most collaborative activity that I can think of.
This leads to a different angle with which to view “the future of work”.
It isn’t just a euphemism for the inevitable advancement of technology, a phenomenon to
be studied abstractly from a distance.
We — tech researchers and practitioners — are workers too, and our fates are
bound up with all other workers.
Because the "future of work” does not bode well for academic and tech workers — just look
at adjunctification, dwindling opportunities for stable employment, tuition increases,
labor abuses committed by major universities, heightened surveillance and union busting.
On top of all that, the fruits of our labor are used to harm working people around the
world, as we continue to see the tech industry work arm in arm with the American military
industrial complex, to sow destruction around the world.
Organizing happens when we form bonds of trust and solidarity between workers
within and across our workplaces.
And so I want to end by sharing some concrete tools for organizing your workplace, so that
we can continue to build the labor movement
and take ownership of our collective futures, together.
Thank you.