#AI#GenerativeAI#Energy#Automation#WageSlavery#Inequality: "AI is everywhere; AI is here. The story around AI implies that it is here because it’s making things efficient: AI is better at detecting cancerous tumours in some scan images than radiographers, AI is faster at finding legal judgements within case law, AI can make office work more efficient by drafting emails or summarizing information from the web.
However, the story of this efficiency leaves out a discussion of some of the costs of AI. AI is expensive, not cheap. The efficiencies that are promised do not necessarily involve less work and fewer costs – just different work and different costs, some of which will only reveal themselves in time. These costs include:
Increased inequities (including inequitable labour between people ‘in front of’ and ‘behind’ the screen; inequitable opportunities for learning resulting from embedding of AI systems in learning and information infrastructures; environmental and material inequities resulting from the use of scarce natural resources to power ubiquitous technologies)
Shaky institutions that struggle to do things differently
Costly need for highly skilled review of AI outputs
First, we need to understand better what makes AI expensive. Then, we need to consider what factors can actually lead to real efficiency. My research has been examining both the deceptive stories that shape the way AI is described, as well as sociotechnical design considerations that must be taken into account when determining whether the cost of AI is worth it."
-That won’t stop bosses from trying to use AI to replace certain jobs, keep pay lower, and demand you and your coworkers produce more work
-Your bosses’ measuring stick for AI output isn’t whether it’s so good it can replace you wholesale, but if it’s “good enough” to justify the savings on labor costs
-Certain industries are uniquely vulnerable to generative AI output, and are more threatened than others
-After workplaces are disrupted by generative AI, employees not laid off or reassigned will have to pick up the pieces, often with more work than before
-Whether or not your boss adopts generative AI directly or your industry is threatened, the technology can be used as leverage against you and your colleagues
-Generative AI may or may not be a flash in the pan, but it can be a wrecking ball to your job regardless, especially if your boss is looking for an excuse to cut costs or to appear innovative — and you should be ready
There will almost certainly be no AI jobs apocalypse. That doesn’t mean your boss isn’t going to use AI to replace jobs, or, more likely, going to use the specter of AI to keep pay down and demand higher productivity"
#Amazon#WageSlavery: "Amazon workers at some fulfillment centers can now purchase neck fans at an in-warehouse store using “swag bucks” earned for good behavior to prevent them from overheating on the job.
The fans are stocked in Amazon’s in-warehouse “Swag Store.” Employees can earn Swag Bucks “for a variety of reasons to include strong safety performance, good teamwork, and more,” an Amazon spokesperson said. Employees who earn enough swag bucks can exchange their “money” for goods at the store. The swag bucks themselves can either be distributed electronically, on the app Amazon workers use to track their shifts, or physically as blue-green strips of paper with the Amazon logo, money bag emojis, and the Amazon mascot Peccy peeking out from behind the words “swag bucks.” The prizes at the Swag Store can range from Amazon backpacks and beanies to Keurig coffee machines and wireless earbuds."
#Marx#Marxism#Spinoza#Philosophy#WageSlavery#Work: "WILL LEWALLEN: You write that most resistance to work is often focused on the specific conditions of employment rather than the general conditions of wage labor. How could something like a four-day workweek help tackle these more universal conditions? And more broadly, what would the effect of a shorter working week be on the political imaginary?
JASON READ: That’s an important question. I think reducing work time would necessarily have the positive impact of creating new ways for people to think about their identities and place in the world other than through work. One of the things you have to take seriously about people’s investment in work, given that they are working so much, is that their free time is usually dedicated to what Marx calls the basic “animal functions” of sleeping, eating, etc. You create a sense in which people go to work because their friends are there; everything they understand about sociality comes from work. The more people work, the more they will begin to identify with work.
So reducing the working week or working days would free people from this cycle. If people have time to do something other than buy groceries and do their laundry just to return to work the next day, they can produce another sense of themselves outside the confines of work. Imagination functions like a wedge, a small point of entry for another way of thinking; if acted upon, it can then push for more. For example, the reduced workweek would give people more time to engage in politics, to demand less work still. One thing that limits political possibilities is work itself." https://jacobin.com/2024/04/marx-spinoza-four-day-workweek
#Capitalism#Labor#WageSlavery: "If you have the buying power to hold prices down, and workers have the labor power to keep wages up, then the business has to absorb that nickel. We can have a world where workers can pay their rent and you can afford your groceries.
So how do we get bosses to agree to take less so we can have more? They've told us how: for bosses, the thing that motivates workers to show up for shitty jobs is fear – fear of losing their homes, fear of going hungry.
When your boss says, "If you don't want to do this job for minimum wage, there's someone else who will," they're telling you that the way to get a raise out of them is to engineer things so that you can say, "If you don't want to pay me a living wage for this job, there's someone else who will."
Their accusation – that you only give someone else a fair shake when you're afraid of losing out – is a confession: to get them to give you a fair shake, we have to make them afraid. They're showing us who they are, and we should believe them."
Don't just wallow in your misery over being the victim of exploitation by your boss and the #capitalist system. Wallowing won't solve your problems. Join your workplaces #union, and if your workplace doesn't have a union, then create one, because that's the only way you can win back your life from #capitalism and break the chains of #wageslavery.
In capitalism, workers create value through their labor, but capitalists exploit this by paying workers less than the value they produce, resulting in an unjust distribution of wealth where workers are systematically undercompensated for their contributions while capitalists accumulate disproportionate profits. Abolish Capitalism!
Today in Labor History February 6, 1919: The Seattle General Strike began. 65,000 workers participated. Longshoremen, trolley operators and bartenders also participated. The strike began in response to government sanctioned wage cuts. Both the AF of L and the IWW participated. During the strike, the workers formed councils, which took over virtually all major city services, including food distribution and security. They also continued garbage collection. Laundry workers continued to handle hospital laundry. And firefighters remained on duty. They established a system of food distribution, which provided 30,000 meals each day. Any exemption to the work stoppage had to be ok’d by the General Strike Committee. Army veterans created an independent police force to maintain order. The Labor War Veteran's Guard prohibited the use of force and didn’t carry weapons. The regular police made no arrests in any actions related to the strike. Overall, arrests dropped to less than half their normal number.
A pamphlet that was distributed during the strike said, “You are doomed to wage slavery till you die unless you wake up, realize that you and the boss have nothing in common, that the employing class must be overthrown, and that you, the workers, must take over the control of your jobs, and through them, the control over your lives instead of offering yourself up to the masters as a sacrifice six days a week, so that they may coin profits out of your sweat and toil."
The strike ended when they brought in federal troops and the workers were pressured to quit by bureaucrats from the national unions, particularly the AFL.
Today in Labor History February 3, 1910: Mary Harris "Mother" Jones addressed Milwaukee brewery workers during a two-month stint working alongside women bottle-washers while on leave from the United Mine Workers:
"Condemned to slave daily in the wash-room in wet shoes and wet clothes, surrounded with foul-mouthed, brutal foremen . . . the poor girls work in the vile smell of sour beer, lifting cases of empty and full bottles weighing from 100 to 150 pounds, in their wet shoes and rags, for they cannot buy clothes on the pittance doled out to them. . . . Rheumatism is one of the chronic ailments and is closely followed by consumption . . . An illustration of what these girls must submit to, one about to become a mother told me with tears in her eyes that every other day a depraved specimen of mankind took delight in measuring her girth & passing comments."
Frederick Douglass was born an enslaved person in 1817 and freed himself in 1838, after 21 years of slavery.
For a time after escaping, Douglas worked for wages as a laborer. In a speech in 1883, Douglas—someone who had personally experienced both antebellum chattel slavery and wage labor—had this to say about the relationship between the two phenomena:
“Experience demonstrates that there may be a wages of slavery only a little less galling and crushing in its effects than chattel slavery, and that this slavery of wages must go down with the other.”
It’s hard to argue with an authority like that.
In his speech, Douglas explained why wage labor is so similar to chattel slavery:
“The man who has it in his power to say to a man you must work the land for me, for such wages as I choose to give, has a power of slavery over him as real, if not as complete, as he who compels toil under the lash. All that a man hath will he give for his life.”
In his brilliant dissertation, “Property and the Power to Say No,” Karl Widerquist cites an exchange that occurred between Union soldiers and a group of newly emancipated people in Savannah, Georgia. When asked what they needed to secure their freedom:
“The group chose at its spokesman Garrison Frazier, a Baptist minister who had purchased the liberty of his wife and himself in 1856. Asked what he understood by slavery, Frazier responded that it meant one person's ‘receiving by irresistible power the work of another man, and not by his consent.’ Freedom he defined as ‘placing us where we could reap the fruit of our own labor, and take care of ourselves;’ the best way to accomplish this was ‘to have land, and turn it and till it by our own labor.’”
There’s a remarkably clear and clear-eyed understanding of freedom and unfreedom from people who had undeniable first-hand knowledge of slavery.
Many people, when they hear the phrase “wage slavery,” take offense to the idea of comparing the horrors of chattel slavery to the quite often banal insults of wage labor. But the thing that defines slavery isn’t “bad working conditions;” it’s the absence of the power to say “no.”
And both Douglas and Frazier were quite clear: wage laborers are as unfree as they were as slaves.
Today in Labor History February 1, 1865: President Lincoln signed the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, abolishing slavery. However, the 13th Amendment does not abolish all forms of slavery. The state is still permitted to force prisoners to work for free, or for wages far below the minimum wage. They are even allowed to do this and sell the products made by prisoners for a profit. And, so long as capitalism exists, wage slavery will still persist.