UK unions want 'worker first' plan for AI as people fear for their jobs Over half of the British public are worried about the impact of AI on their jobs, according to employment unions, which want the UK government to adopt a "worker first" strategy rather than simply allowing corporations to ditch employees for algorithms. The Trades Union Congress (TUC), a federation of trade unions in England …
Ecommerce/tech-giant/estate/multinational/etc. "owners get richer and richer".
Nothing new here, AI is just another opportunity for wealth transfer at the expense of the majority.
For decades the UK has rigged the legal and tax systems to allow the great estates to to dodge taxes.
UK law is set up to favour wealth transfer to the wealthy, while extracting all manner of rents from the masses, start with that, rather than trivial posturing about AI.
The TUC isn’t trying to protect workers from AI. They’re trying to preserve their relevance in a system that has already outgrown them. Their whole playbook is still written in the factory-floor, boss-vs-worker frame of the 20th century. That model assumes a stable employer, a union negotiating at the table, and incremental concessions. But in a world where AI can atomise work into micro-tasks and outsource it globally, that frame is obsolete.
So what do they do? They cling to “guardrails” and “worker-first strategies” that sound protective but in practice function as regulatory capture. Complex compliance regimes don’t hurt Google or Microsoft - they cement their dominance. The only people crushed are the small challengers who might have given workers genuine alternatives. In other words: the TUC’s demands conveniently double as a corporate moat.
This is the real scam. They posture as defenders of the working class while playing prefect for the elite. They tell workers, “Don’t worry, we’ll negotiate on your behalf,” but the negotiation is about who gets to own the castle, not how workers might leave the feudal estate altogether. AI could be a tool of liberation - allowing individuals or co-ops to compete with giants - but the TUC would rather keep workers in the old master-slave paradigm, where their role as gatekeeper remains secure.
Strip away the rhetoric and what’s left is simple: the unions are managing decline, soothing workers into compliance, and making sure the wealth transfer upwards happens without too much noise.
Could'nt agree more
Leader of a railway union here : 200 000 pounds + perks , led his drivers out on strike causing chaos for joe public in an effort to add to the drivers 60 000 pound salary.
How dare he get so much while making the public suffer so much
PS
Railway company boss at the time 4 000 000 pounds per year + bonuses and share options + golden parachute if he messes up so badly he gets fired.
Inconveniencing hundreds of thousands of workers at the drop of a hat. It seems screwing workers over is OK as long as it is the unions who do it.
>> monitor workers, allocate tasks, rewards and sanctions,
Yeah. As Joe sits in the bog for an hour reading his redtop comic, he should be paid the same as Bill who works diligently. Oooh, the algorithm allocated me a task.
Me? I'm nearly retired.
I don't enjoy seeing people lose their jobs (I have been through this several times thanks to companies being sold), but ostensible AI is just another rung on the efficiency ladder. Should we go back to manually unloading ships with thousands of stevedores? Would you employ four people when three can do the job as well if you organised them better?
Will 'AI' as it currently is do as good a job as Bill? Probably not. Actually I will say no, it won't. Can people be better and more efficiently employed? In many cases, yes. Should Joe who takes a dump for an hour each day as Bill works not be held to account? What's going on, Joe? Why do you take so long to dump?
It's called experience.
I have been on both sides of the cutting. As the companies I worked for bought smaller companies (effectively to buy their customers), we didn't need all their staff. Need is the important word. We could have kept employing them, but what for? We already had an efficient setup.
When I was cut on the occasions when I was cut, for much the same reasons as above, I did not complain and demand protection. One of the purposes of IT is to introduce efficiencies.
Go on. Fire everyone and replace them with an LLM. It's okay, I'll wait. I want to see these efficiencies you all keep talking about.
And later, when you are in tears, we, the commentards of thereg, will 'fix' things for you. For a fee, of course.
You might scare the proletariat with your marketing bullshit, but we don't even need a mouse to copy files.
The TUC bleating about “AI harms” is the fox asking for a seat on the henhouse committee. For decades, unions like the TUC have made their peace with capital: wage suppression dressed up as “pragmatism,” redundancy packages spun as “transitions,” and the slow hollowing out of worker protections packaged as “flexibility.” Now they want to play saviour? Please.
If the unions were serious about defending labour, they wouldn’t be writing glossy PDFs and begging Whitehall to attach “strings” to AI subsidies. They’d be calling strikes, blocking legislation, and actually making it painful for corporations to automate people into the dole queue. Instead, the TUC has settled into its real role: corporate-controlled opposition. Their job is to pacify, to manage outrage, to put a polite bow on the process of replacing living wages with subscription logins.
The Department for Science, Innovation & Technology didn’t sign an MoU with OpenAI because they’re worried about working-class stability; they signed it because they’re knee-deep in bed with Silicon Valley. Billions in “research funding” is nothing more than public money sluiced straight into the pockets of companies whose business model is stripping jobs and then reselling them as cloud services.
So while the TUC pens reports about “worker-first plans,” the reality is simpler: the government and corporations are playing pass-the-parcel with public cash, and the unions are there to make sure the workers don’t riot before the music stops.
I've spent most of my career being a 'knowledge worker' with the 'every day is a school day' mentality. That means I've acquired a reasonable amount of knowledge on the way...but crucially with the understanding to go with it.
When it comes to "people fear for their jobs", I guess that depends on what you do for a living. I'm damn sure that AI can't do anything in the physical world so any worker who is 'hands on' like the trades / services etc should be fine. It's the more ephemeral 'knowledge' people like me that'll suffer, as 'knowledge' is only a quick search away these days, meaning my collection of reference *books* is largely irrelevant - I have to look something up in 'the library' less and less these days.
What really worries me about AI is that everyone will have access to all the knowledge they want, but without truly understanding or comprehending what they've been presented with (hallucinated or otherwise!). IMO, anyone who *relies* on AI is just dumbing themselves down. By all means, use it as a tool to train yourself but don't just rely on it.
Yes, every day really is a school day...just remember not to listen too much to the new AI 'teacher'. They have less experience than you at leaning.
>> I'm damn sure that AI can't do anything in the physical world so any worker who is 'hands on' like the trades / services etc should be fine.
Yes. No amount of 'AI' is ever going to replace barbers or electricians or plumbers. It might tell somebody how to install a cable but it can't actually do it.
>> access to all the knowledge they want, but without truly understanding or comprehending
You mean AI 'agents'.
Left/Right no longer has credence in the UK for summarising political/ideological stance. Mr Blair's spell in prime ministerial office put paid to that; it marked the beginning of convergence by opportunistic politicians from the former 'Left' and the former 'Right'. Later, Mr Starmer's Zionist conspiracy ousted Jeremy Corbyn, an honest man. Few people show awareness that the social and economic divide is nowadays characterised by neoliberals versus the rest, i.e. 'the 0.01%' against all others. None of the politicians prating from the former Left, Right, and Centre, shows awareness that largesse they receive from those individuals and corporations which 'bought' them is transient; they are 'useful fools' for their 'betters'. A politician, e.g. Mr Clegg, Mr Blair, and the Johnson abomination, may, upon retirement, accrue millions of pounds, and will hob-nob with the true 'movers and shakers' of neoliberalism (and the Ayn Rand dystopia it leads to) under the false impression of being a social equal. In fact, by virtue of 'regression towards the mean', a statistical consequence of Mendelian genetics, financial dynasties settle into complacency and non-productive use of accrued wealth; moreover, drawing from a restricted gene pool hastens deterioration; all of which is fateful for mankind's prospects. However, Starmer, Blair, Clegg, and Johnson, genes won't figure within the pool of the self-proclaimed 'elite'.
Our 'leaders', now a self-perpetuating 'class' dependent upon 'democratic' process predicated upon manipulable ignorance, and their ill-begotten offspring, may live out their lives in comfort and far from penury. However, they in their support of their masters fail to grasp that even families holding capital of, say, £100 million, are destined for serfdom along with the rest. This follows from 'opportunity' offered by wealth scaling upwards at a greater than linear rate, and from the associated arithmetic of compounding. In effect, 'the 0.01%' don't need to pull up the drawbridge behind them because it is an automatic process.
In this context, whining by latter-day socialists over 'inequalities' of various kinds (income, wealth, health, etc.) not only betrays their ignorance of how measurable quantities display variation - meaning that 'inequality' per se is a natural condition, the proper concern therefore being about avoidable deleterious variation - but also curtails their imaginative options for societal reform and progression.
The remnant of independently thinking trades union bosses ought to turn their minds towards opportunities arising from well-placed 'AI'- use initiatives. Although 'AI' ain't fully as wonderful as it's cracked up to be, it, nevertheless, can have profoundly beneficial applications. Thoughtful peasants with families destined for greater servitude should dust-off pitchforks and sharpen scythes to back demands for truly radical social and economic reform. An obvious first step would be the introduction of 'universal basic income' (UBI); that acknowledges an entitlement by all to a share of extant and newly generated wealth. Income above subsistence level represents 'opportunity' (for good and for ill).
I don't know whether to vote this up or down. You recognise that a fully automated society will require a universal basic income and that the two main parties in the UK are just two cheeks of the same arse. But on the other hand, you don't seem to realise that the left/right divide certainly includes neoliberalism on the far right and the only reason there isn't a meaningful divide at the top is because they have stamped out as much of the left as is possible. You're also antagonistic towards socialists and call them ignorant, when in fact most socialists want a society that is fair for everyone rather than an impossible state of perfect equality - the things you say they should want in your last paragraph.
Most people want a society that is fair for everyone, socialists and capitalists just disagree on how to get there (and, to a lesser extent, how to define "fair").
These days, though, we no longer get a simple choice at an election because today's politicians treat the whole process as if it's a business, where all that matters is scoring the most votes.
Principles went out of the window with Tony Bliar, and are showing few signs of returning. Ironically it's the so-called extremists like Corbyn and Farage who seem to have a genuine idea of where the country should go, and how to get there. As expected, not everyone agrees with them or likes them, but it feels like an improvement after the Blair/Cameron/Sunak/Starmer blob.
Farage hasn't had an intelligent idea in his life.
He's simply playing the game that the Tories were doing 3+ years ago, by shouting slogans that the Daily Mail readership want to hear, mainly about stopping boats.
The only reason he has any position in UK politics is because he carefully chose to stand in the most uneducated, poor town in Essex, which has a very high ex-prison population. And even Clacton folk now generally regret their choice.
I'm still trying to figure out what Farage's clear direction is? His position appears to be that if he does exactly what didn't work for the Tories using [handwave] allocated resources, this time it'll be different, but it'll be important to remind those dirty Europeans they're all cunts, and they are sure to be gifting intelligence for border force to act on for free. Then again, he spends so much of his time being an obnoxious, alcoholic pissant, it's rare to hear any real policy, so perhaps I missed it.
Not that Kier is anything utter than a staggeringly wet mop, of course. Carefully setting up a police state for Farage's Cambridge Analytica alumni to seize later, of course.
> I don't know whether to vote this up or down
Down, Corbin was unelectable and they had to get back to where most the votes were. It helped that the Tories went ever further right and don't seem able to stop.
Sadly they are just as bad as each other and without PR voting it is pointless voting for another party here as the 3 (I include Reform in this now) have split the vote between them
Ah, yes, getting back to where the votes are. Let's see how that went, shall we?
Votes for Labour under Corbyn:
2017: 12,877,918
2019: 10,269,051
Votes for Labour under Starmer:
2024: 9,708,716
Corbyn was not unelectable. It took total media opposition, his own party actively briefing against him and sabotaging the election - they've since openly admitted to doing this BTW, so don't think to contradict - and the Tories having the wedge issue of Brexit to push on in order to keep him out. People want his policies; blind polling shows overwhelming support for them if you remove the party names.
Conversely, Starmer is completely unelectable. His popularity after one year is lower than that of any recent Tory PM at the end of their term. He's alienated the traditional Labour base in favour of chasing after far right voters who are never going to vote for him - why would they vote for Diet Fascism being offered by a man who has lied and pivoted on every issue he was elected on both as Labour leader and PM, when Farage is offering full fat and they know he's a fascist? He didn't even win in 2024, really; the Tory vote just collapsed harder and was also split by Reform.
I think it's more of a society / world / capitalism issue. Whilst I'd be very suspicious of any new system (because I'm doing quite well out of the current system, thank-you very much), I personally think that for many years now, a lot of jobs are pointless and don't actually need to be done. That includes some of the software projects that I've worked on.
If you think of it from a 'needs' perspective in terms of:
- Food
- Shelter / housing
- Energy
- Healthcare
- Clothing
- Infrastructure
- (Whatever else I've missed)
how many jobs are there, especially in the UK, that aren't anything to do with the above categories? And how many exist that could already be automated way before this current set of AI technologies? The issue is very much, how does society work when only a small number of people actually need to work? Does everyone become a YouTuber? Does all the wealth concentrate at the top of companies that are involved in necessary activities whilst everyone else languishes in poverty?
I don't have the answers, but I sure wish we'd start thinking about them. The earlier that I can retire because the 'make work' has been done away with, the better.
Corporates, government and unions have no idea what they are dealing with. 'Guardrails'. 'Harms'. AI as a magic solution. It's pitiful.
AI is a bubble and the software is unreliable - even more so than cheap staff. Quit worrying. It will soon be one of those things nobody mentions anymore, like Covid, Brexit and the Metaverse.
Many British companies are running on empty, and can't pay to add AI products to their outdated software systems anyway.
As for unionised labour in the UK...
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/clyjd3xe2zdo
If you want to make money in the UK, avoid AI and avoid employing unionised labour. Not because you want to underpay or overwork people - you should value and reward good staff who are vital to your business - but because unions are one of those things that are brilliant in theory but toxic in practice.
