You might have heard something about AI recently. Suggestions it will kill all humanity, that kind of thing. My LinkedIn is aflame, but not with people running scared. In fact most of my connections make a different point: who does the “we are doomed by AI” narrative serve? The standard answer: the same people who are building the AI tools. So called “big tech”.
Union staff reject big tech…
When I run AI training sessions for union staff, the words “big tech” come up all the time. Union staff are anxious about the companies behind the AI tools and the power structures they represent, and doubt they will ever build tools that benefit workers.
In fact they think that big tech companies are actively supporting hostile actors – far right, authoritarian, regressive voices – to grow stronger.
… and yet we use it
But when we ask union staff in our ongoing AI survey which AI tools they use, 86% named at least one big-tech product and 80% named nothing else. And ever more union staff are naming Copilot as the tool they use – it has overtaken ChatGPT to become the most-named AI tool in the movement. But few unions will have made a deliberate decision to adopt Copilot: it arrived bundled inside software (Microsoft 365) unions had already bought.
So we worry about big tech helping hostile actors to grow stronger, while we use the same big tech tools. Is there an alternative?
Register for a Unions 21 webinar and hear from small, progressive, union-focused tech
Unions 21 asked seven organisations that build AI and digital tools for unions and progressive organisations what unions should do about AI, technology and its impact.
We will be publishing a series of blogs based on the interviews in the coming weeks: participants don't always agree with each other, but we could learn a lot from what they have to say.
We’re launching the series at a webinar on Wednesday, 23 September at 1:30–3pm BST / 14:30 – 16:00 CEST / 8:30-10am EDT
In the webinar panellists will discuss some of the following key questions about technology (in particular AI) and the union movement:
Should unions learn from how hostile actors use technology, or refuse to play that game?
Are unions even ready for AI? What does being ready actually mean?
What can unions do that hostile actors can't? How can we build power in our approach to AI and technology adoption?
The panellists and contributors to the series
At the event you’ll hear from:
Genny Mayhew, CTO at SEIU union.
Craig Johnson, President and CTO of Change Agent, a company building an LLM-based (AI) tool specifically for progressive organisations.
Sam Jeffers, partner of Join Together, a co-operative building software to help workers join unions online quickly and easily, with higher-quality, more useful data for the union.
Peyman Owladi, Founder of Poteris, a co-operative building bespoke tools (like PCS’s Rep Coach) for unions that want to connect better with their members.
Antti Mäki of Uniofy, a company building comprehensive digital organising software for the union movement.
We’re also indebted to three contributors who unfortunately can’t make the webinar:
Ned Howey, CEO of Tectonica, a company building AI-driven products to help progressive organisations deepen their organising, not replace it with easy transactional asks.
Jonathan Tanner, Founder of Rootcause, a not-for-profit building tools that help progressive organisations build their information power, when monitoring and responding is getting ever more complex.
Digital/Organizing (Switzerland), a full-service digital agency for progressive causes, building the campaign infrastructure and running the communications, fundraising and mobilisation work on top of it.
We have choices we can make
I started by asking who the "we are doomed" AI narrative serves. Part of the answer is that it serves big tech. It makes AI sound like a single thing, built in one place, by people we can’t control.
That’s not the reality. AI (and all technology) is something we can approach as a choice: we decide what we use and what we invest our time and money in.That's true for you personally, for your union, and for the movement as a whole. As I said in my recent blog introducing the series over on the Unions 21 site:
Ultimately, every union using the safe, off-the-shelf software option is making a defensible decision on its own terms… But the aggregate of all those sensible decisions is an ecosystem in which few small union-focused alternatives ever reach the scale that makes their business viable. If unions want an alternative to big tech supporting unions, unions will have to exercise their collective market power to do so. No institution in the economy understands collective leverage better than a trade union.
If you want to hear from people at some of these union-focused alternatives, come along to our webinar.
