Tech Workers Coalition

If you are anxious about how AI will impact or is already impacting your job, you don’t just need to doomscroll about it. Collective action can, will, and is making an impact against employers’ attempts to sloppify our jobs, and we’ve started to put together resources at workersdecide.tech to help people get started.

The bubble surrounding generative AI has a broad set of social impacts – from environmental devastation to economic instability to the ongoing drive to make every product somehow worse and less reliable by shoving AI in there – as well as to the very nature of human interaction and knowledge as AI slop drives out real information and connection. It impacts us as well in the workplace, where we spend much of our waking lives – and it is as workers especially that we can organize collectively to resist.

Our experience so far has not been that AI is capable of or going to replace our labor. However, the threat of AI and the use of AI mandates has been used already to drive down wages, institute speedups, and generally degrade our working conditions.

Despite its general lack of economic utility and propensity to lie, corporate bosses continue to roll out new AI initiatives – either forcing workers to train or use AI, or to measure “productivity” gains from such tools through intensified monitoring. Those who argue against this are considered stick-in-the-muds who don’t like progress and don’t like new things, leaving critical workers’ voices isolated and fearful of speaking up.

It doesn’t have to be this way. At a range of companies, workers have started to raise concerns and fight back, and the increasingly broader social “techlash” against Silicon Valley hype-merchants can further embolden our struggles.

A group of organizers pulled together as the AI Chaos Prevention Committee, coming from a range of organizations, including Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, the Times Tech Guild, Turkopticon, workers organized with Code-CWA, as well as DAIR, Tech Workers Coalition, and Collective Action in Tech.

We pooled our experiences, surveyed other workers and put together a website, workersdecide.tech, to serve as a resource for all those wanting to organize to take back control of our workplaces from AI mandates – to let workers, not bosses, decide what tools to use and how we, the experts, can do our jobs best. The site holds a range of organizing tools and resources to help start conversations with coworkers, to suggest demands and organizing tactics, and also to develop effective messaging and broad solidarity that bridges the wide variety of assessments workers have of emerging generative AI technologies.

We’re calling on our fellow tech workers and organizers to do three things:

1) Most importantly, if there is an AI rollout at your workplace, and if it is something that you do not like, then take a look at the resources, and see how you can make first steps to turning this into an organizing issue that mobilizes others and can impact the boss.
2) If your friends are running into anti-worker AI policies at your jobs, pass along the website and make the same ask.
3) We want to hear from you! Write in with articles on your experiences – what management is doing, and how workers feel about it. Better yet, write in with stories about how workers stood up for themselves, and lessons to share to others in the same boat.

This early phase of adoption is where the most possibilities are open – where every company is a new test case, and where how we respond can set precedents and standards for years to come. We can put workers in charge of our tools and conditions if we can take advantage of this crucial moment.