Da KI droht, Arbeitsplätze zu vernichten, ziehen die Gewerkschaften eine Grenze
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-as-ai-threatens-to-eliminate-jobs-unions-are-drawing-a-line/?utm_medium=Referrer:+Social+Network+/+Media&utm_campaign=Shared+Web+Article+Links
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“Our focus in negotiations is on defending our members’ rights and protecting their jobs from the risks posed by AI,” said Mark Hancock, president of CUPE, in a recent interview with The Globe and Mail. “Do employers want to bargain this kind of language? No. But this is a fight we won’t back down from.”
One of the things I’ve noticed in the last few years as companies pick up AI is that a lot of them miss the point. They dismiss workers because AI streamlines their business, meaning that they want to maintain their current service or output level.
If they kept their employees, they could do more. Executives that don’t see this as an opportunity to supercharge their company should be replaced with AI. Sort of a facetious statement, but also sort of accurate.
“As machine looms threaten to eliminate jobs, luddites are drawing a line”
I’m a midlevel programmer at a brand name tech company, I work with ai everyday. Claude opus 4.6 can do my job about 80% as well as I can. It’s one of the most expensive ai models but it’s qualitatively different from other ais which produce very uneven work and spin out into goose chases if you take your eye off them.
Using it means all the drudgery is gone from job and the bottleneck for shipping new things is coordinating with other people and having enough ideas for things to ship. The problem is, you hire interns and juniors to teach them and to give them shit work to alleviate the drudgery of midlevel and senior programmers.
If I had a junior or an intern on my team I have no idea what I would have them do. There is nothing the early-career version of me could do that I couldn’t quickly do with ai now. That saves the company money but it cuts off the supply of new talent.
No company has figured out the solution here, but it definitely isn’t cutting off or over-regulating AI. My company wouldn’t be competitive at all if it couldn’t use AI in Canada to reduce headcount since all its international competitors are currently doing that.
We’d be in a much poorer world if the Luddites had held back mechanization. It’ll be the same if the anti-AI people won. We should have had smart government policy back then to ease the transition and we should definitely make sure we do it this time.
>unions are drawing a line
What’s left of them. Unions have been declining since 1980 and most jobs being eliminated by AI are tech jobs held by people who haven’t unionized because they’ve historically seen themselves as temporarily poor millionaires.
One consideration here that should make you want to side with the unions is that American capitalism is shifting away from quality to just having a minimum viable product – free labour and an absolutely shitty service is better to these people than labour costs and a good service, because the only goal for them is short term line go up.
Even if replacing you with AI causes a massive drop in quality, they’ll do it anyway because it’s cheaper. Unions usually get accused of being in conflict with consumer benefit, but in this case they’re probably protecting it. There are still very few jobs that AI can do a *good* job of, there are plenty that it can do a shitty job of.