In reflecting on this past decade of “future of work” conversations, I revisited journalist Sarah Kessler’s piece on the long history of anxiety about automation, robots, and the workplace. She looks at many changes over the course of 500 years, starting with knitting machines during the reign of Elizabeth I in England. What is clear over this long period is that the imaginings of how these changes might affect work and jobs actually reflected the anxieties of people creating the narratives more so than the realities of working class life. While Her Majesty fretted about denying “young maidens” access to knitting work to earn their daily bread, she didn’t seem all that concerned that the survival of these women was predicated on a series of decisions they had little power to influence in the first place. Our response to automation and mechanization continues in this pattern, focusing on the development of specific technologies within industries rather than the bigger questions of agency, power, and control over our daily lives.

This dynamic has also been true of “future of work” conversations over the past decade. I cofounded Coworker in 2012 to support worker-led organizing in companies that had very little union representation. As the gig economy emerged, we at Coworker, alongside many of our allies, focused on platform companies like Uber, Airbnb, and Amazon Marketplace that were disrupting specific industries such as lodging, transit, and peer-to-peer selling. While it was clear to many of us that those efforts would have a significant impact on workers in those industries, we underestimated (and underprepared for) the impact these technologies would have on working class people more broadly. 

Many in the labor movement were rightly concerned about ways in which the platforms were blurring the lines between who counts as an employee or a contractor, but failed to adequately respond to the use of algorithms to obscure corporate decision making and turn consumer pricing, worker pay, and access to services into a casino game where the house always wins. These mechanisms, honed on the backs of immigrant drivers and cleaners, are now de rigeur across multiple parts of the economy. Grocery pricing, health care, public benefits, and housing are all shaped by automated systems based on limitless surveillance, data monopolization, and behavioral manipulation to extract ever more profit. 

Although these systems have proliferated without meaningful checks, my hopeful view is that the labor movement has built ties of solidarity with many allied movements. The technology policy community, which emerged among media reform, civil liberties, and internet freedom activists, has developed a strong field of advocates working in concert with labor and civil rights movements. Together, we have established anti-surveillance frameworks that address the collective impact of both corporate and government spying on vulnerable communities in ways that go beyond the narrow concept of privacy. Researchers at places like the UC Berkeley Labor Center, Data & Society, and AI Now have documented harms across multiple communities of workers, people with disabilities, immigrants, and people involved with the carceral system, showing the interconnections of  those harms on a systematic level. Journalists like Brian Merchant, Sarah Kessler, Edward Ongweso, Lauren K. Gurley, and Max Read have investigated and exposed the impacts of these technologies to general audiences. 

This work has strengthened our ability to shape the future. We are much better positioned to respond to the proliferation of artificial intelligence than we would have been 10 years ago. Through close partnerships with technology policy experts, the labor movement has played a crucial role in shaping federal policy on AI as it relates to work and jobs, while negotiating landmark agreements on the use of AI in the creative industries through the Writers Guild of America and the Screen Actors Guild. 

This is significant progress that we should be proud of. But we also know that this is not enough. The next 10 years of the Future of Work must focus on deeper questions of how we build the political power necessary to ensure that workers can determine how the technological power of this country is used. In order to build that power, we must go beyond policy and collective bargaining to engage many more people in a positive, democratic vision for the future of work. 

Shawn Fain, the president of the United Auto Workers, has encouraged other unions to build toward a general strike by setting their contracts to end simultaneously in May 2028. Unlike most strikes by workers, a general strike is not about the details of a single contract negotiation, but is instead meant to promote a working class vision for a better world: clean water, decent housing, education, health care, and time with our families. 

That vision should also include a more democratic, worker-led approach to how we use technology and how it impacts our communities. What might it mean over the next few years for technology policy and labor activists to work toward that? How do we engage working class people in designing a vision for technology, not just as people experiencing harms? How do we think about cities, states, and municipalities as sites of experimentation and contestation for new models of workers co-designing technology initiatives with employers? What kinds of organizations do we have to be and what capacities do we have to build in order to do this? These are the key questions to move beyond 500 years of reacting to the terms of specific technologies and instead asserting an agenda driven by the imagination of working class people. 

About the Author

Michelle Miller
Director of Innovation,
Center for Labor and a Just Economy
Harvard Law School

Michelle Miller is the Director of Innovation for the Center of Labor and a Just Economy at Harvard Law School where she researches the impact of technology on working class communities.  She joined the Center after a decade as the co-founder and co-director of Coworker, an organization that nurtures early stage worker-led organizing. In her role at Coworker, she also pioneered the labor movement’s research of and response to the proliferation of software being used to manage and surveil workers, through early reports, research and documentation of automated technology. She is a Visiting Social Innovator with the Social Innovation + Change Initiative at the Harvard Kennedy School and sits on the boards of the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research and Arts and Democracy. Michelle lives in Brooklyn, NY.

About this Series

This is part of a series called “Back to the ‘Future of Work’: Revisiting the Past and Shaping the Future,” curated by the Aspen Institute Future of Work Initiative. For this series, we gather insights from labor, business, academia, philanthropy, and think tanks to take stock of the past decade and attempt to divine what the next one has in store. As the future is yet unwritten, let’s figure out what it takes to build a better future of work.

About the Future of Work Initiative

The Future of Work Initiative — an initiative of the Economic Opportunities Program — aims to identify, develop, and amplify solutions that address the challenges of today while building toward a future in which workers are safe, empowered, and equipped to thrive in our changing world.