Keir Starmer’s recent announcement to propel the UK towards becoming an artificial intelligence (AI) ‘superpower’ was welcome. A recent study revealed that London has the highest number of tech businesses and startups, surpassing Silicon Valley in startup density with the ‘Cambridge Cluster’ emerging as Europe’s leading startup area. AI won’t be stopped and will have an impact on all aspects of people’s working and social lives.
Thats why the Trades Union Congress (TUC) set up a special taskforce involving industry experts and union officials with firsthand knowledge of dealing with technological change.
The TUC’s report and its apparent dismissal
The taskforce produced a special report and the TUC’s draft artificial intelligence (employment and regulation) bill did all the spade work for Labour in setting out how it intended to protect workers. Key are those on the digital front line: healthcare, finance, media, science and engineering, transport and digital tech workers.
So what happened to the bill? Strangely, it didn’t even receive a mention by Starmer in his speech on AI policy and the proposed construction of data centres.
Both AI and data centres have huge implications for working people and the UK economy.
The TUC taskforce draft bill that urged Starmer not to bet the house on digital tech barons went unmentioned – drawing strong criticism from employment law experts. The Institute of Employment Rights (IER) director James Harrison had this to say:
“I watched the PM’s speech and there wasn’t a word about the TUC bill or workers’ rights. AI will not be the panacea to our economy that the PM is making it out to be. Without adequate protections this could lead to a race to the bottom for workers.”
AI fears and concerns despite Starmer backing
Starmer referred to AI as “working for working people”, but he didn’t cite any examples of where this is the case. Instead, AI is known to erode pay, intrude on privacy, damage health and safety, and intensify work – something that the IER and the Campaign For Trade Union Freedom claim occurs all too regularly when these cutting-edge technologies are given free rein.
The TUC’s draft bill ensured that there would be a legal requirement for employers to consult unions on the use of ‘high risk’ and intrusive forms of AI in the workplace. These changes include a legal right for job seekers and workers to have a human review of decisions made by AI systems so they can challenge AI decisions that are unfair and discriminatory. A notable inclusion also are amendments to the Equality Act to guard against discriminatory algorithms, protections against unfair dismissal by AI and a prohibition on some uses of emotion recognition technology. The TUC also included the right to a personalised explanation of high-risk decisions made by AI workers in Britain’s media and digital tech sector, accounting for over two million jobs.
Data centres dubbed ‘critical national infrastructure’
As AI saw rapid growth, the PM announced the creation of new data centres to help prepare the economy as well as boost employment.
Prior to the election, the secretary of state for science and technology Peter Kyle rolled the pitch with tech giants such as Amazon and Microsoft, discussing the easing up of regulation on the building of these resource exhaustive data centres. The projects in question can be added to the list of nationally significant critical infrastructure, putting them on the same level as hospitals, military installations, and airports, which are all under the control of the secretary of state with regard to their construction and location.
Recently in both Ireland and the US, data centres have been operating 24/7 and are proving controversial locally. Some politicians suggest they create large numbers of jobs – therefore worth it.
But as one experienced union official representing workers in the digital tech sector told me:
“The jobs that will be created are nowhere near the numbers the government are saying. They are wildly optimistic. Despite their size these data farms are likely to attract specialist staff from outside of the locality – many workers in the centres will be specialist contractors on high salaries. I doubt there will be jobs bonanza. In the AI sector many of the jobs will be highly specialised in jobs like machine learning, computer vision engineers, robotics engineering and deep learning professionals.”
The importance of organising the tech workforce
So what about the unions? One of the key problems for unions organising in the digital tech sector is that membership remains stubbornly low not just in big tech, but also in small startup companies. This isn’t to say there’s a shortage in unions relevant to the industry. In Britain for example, the Communication and Workers Union created the United Tech and Allied Workers Union Branch to organise workers in Apple stores. Notably also is the white-collar union Prospect. In the US, workers are forming unions in specific companies, but there have been no huge breakthroughs in organising workers in the industry.
The secretary of the Unite London Digital and Tech branch James Bowen says:
“AI can replace a real person and workers become concerned for their jobs. Service desks, first-line jobs which are heavily scripted can be replaced by an online chatbot. AI can be used to write code, reducing the number of software developers required so there are fears over job security.”
Bowen also adds that there are fears over AI discrimination:
“People have biases and this impacts the many choices that are made when building and training an AI whose purpose is to make decisions which impacts people’s lives. There’s a good argument to be made that AI should not make any management decisions.”
Going for growth is one thing, but creating an environment where unions feel voiceless, and there is no real regulatory framework, is a recipe for future employment disaster.
Labour MPs need to start asking leadership the awkward questions about what protections the government intends to introduce to protect workers in line with the TUC’s recommendations, as their constituents will soon have to face the inevitable reality that is the AI driven workplace.
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