oh no, AI again
but this time with an inexplicable helping of labor union support
[this post represents my own opinions and not necessarily those of my employer or any entities affiliated with my employer]
Is anyone surprised that labor-related rage has brought me out of the woodwork. (Or, maybe you’re new here.)
On Tuesday, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), a 1.7 million-member labor union, announced that it had gone full tech oligarch and partnered with OpenAI, Microsoft, Anthropic, and others to prioritize offering “high-quality AI training to educators.” Lest that sentence be as incomprehensible to you as it still is to me, a translation: a labor union has decided to push the thing billionaires and CEOs love because it lets them pay fewer workers even worse wages. And if you’re thinking, hey Anna, aren’t labor unions supposed to protect workers and fight for better wages, you’ll understand why I’m currently holding a blowtorch.
Let me briefly set the blowtorch down, because my less-terminally-online father reminded me last week that some people are only now learning about the destructive environmental impact of AI. The same is probably true about the relationship between AI art and fascism[1] and why the far right loves it[2], AI’s deep racism (because surprise, people build AI and people are racist), the Global South workers behind your AI who make poverty wages, the impacts on your brain functions, all the stealing required to make the tech bros’ toys go brr, and all the ways AI is making teaching (you know, the thing AFT’s members do) a living hell. You may also not watch as much YouTube as I do and thus have not seen every single ad in existence for Grammarly, an AI writing tool framed explicitly in said ads as a way for students to spend the least time on their studies possible. Bosses are saying the quiet part out loud now and a labor union is choosing to elevate this wretched bane of our collective existences. I digress.
But there’s another reason to be fucking pissed that the AFT has willingly gotten in bed with an organization with so many scandals that Time had to write a whole article to keep them all straight: it’s a distraction. At a time when the state is boasting about kidnapping workers and trying to destroy public education, one of the country’s biggest organizations of workers in public education has decided to instead go, hmm, what if we accepted this boss-designed reality instead of doing what the labor movement actually exists to do and organizing to imagine and build something better.
Toni Morrison infamously explained the function of racism as distraction: “it keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being.” Scholar Alyosxa Tudor explained TERFism (trans-exclusionary radical feminism) in a similar way. Instead of actually working for trans rights (or, for trans people, just existing in peace for five seconds), people have to waste time dealing with JK Rowling. Instead of actually building an antiracist society, people have to expend precious energy justifying their right to exist. And instead of actually fighting for something better than techno-capitalism, the AFT has decided instead to make us all waste breath telling literal professional labor advocates what they should already know (a trap I have also fallen into by writing this, I realize).
I don’t work for AFT, but I imagine their staff organizers have had a year similar to mine: bargaining multiple contracts, working on strikes and other actions, protecting members from ICE, reacting constantly to the latest attack on education, trying to squeeze in the crucial on-the-ground coalition- and capacity-building so that everything doesn’t feel like only reacting, dealing with the day to day of bosses being bosses and employers exploiting workers, and on and on and on. No one has time to fight their own damn union. No one has time to explain to union leaders who should know better that tech companies are not benign actors investing millions in this farce with AFT out of the goodness of their hearts, but because there’s probably fine print somewhere about getting free access to the reams of digital member data that unions have, and at the very least this will increase the name recognition and brand loyalty of these absolute vultures of companies.
My most generous interpretation is that AFT leaders, like all of us, are simply people, and people are ill-equipped to educate themselves about all the things affecting their lives (almost as though capitalism, the thing that makes labor unions necessary in the first place, drains our energy and devours our attention while also building the things that will kill us faster). I have many thoughts about the amount of political education work unions need to be doing period, and especially right now, amongst already overwhelming workloads. (That would be the capitalism again.) I would venture to suggest that so much of the organizing unions are trying to do right now is in fact ill-fated, if not impossible, without more political education, and that a re-orientation of resources is critical to the fights we’re currently in. If only so many union members were professional educators. If only their own unions weren’t so often committed to undercutting and dismissing their expertise and experience.
And this is, as mentioned, still generous. People in positions of power know better. AFT president Randi Weingarten is an adult who insists she and her team investigated this issue thoroughly. Individuals responsible to millions of workers do not get to claim ignorance of something that exists to undermine their entire sector.
AFT president Randi Weingarten has been rightly ratioed online for her organization’s blatantly boss-friendly move in championing AI. “We [the AFT] have been outspoken about the lack of regulation and guardrails [for AI],” she said. “That’s why we’re organizing, not reacting, to make sure AI works for us.”
Organizing is something that you do with workers. Partnering with bosses is something you do, shockingly enough, with bosses. When unions do the latter, they cede their raison d’être to ultra-wealthy men whose commitment to building apocalypse bunkers betrays their core belief: that no one but themselves is actually worth helping. What an utter embarrassment.
(If you are in fact a boss and you have somehow found your way here, please just read this.)
[1] Once upon a time, I did an exercise with my students where we put the word “terrorist” into an AI art generator to see what would happen. Guess how many times the AI generated a brown person and why the answer is “every single time.”
[2] Probably a good rule of thumb for a labor union not to do things the far right loves.