Technology makes work easier. Why is it used as a weapon against workers?
You’ve just got a great new job, or so you think. You sign on for work from home, log in and log out when you want and, over the day, you get call-ins for any number of ten-minute mini-tasks. Welcome to the gig economy—in this case, Amazon’s Mechanical Turk platform.
Classed as independent contractors, workers who sign on to Mechanical Turk have no guaranteed wages or conditions or other workplace protections. They bid against thousands worldwide for each task, and often stay logged in all day, even into the night, to get a bare minimum wage. The boss can block them at will—in effect sack them—and the pay rate per job keeps falling. Amazon may well have created the most unregulated labour marketplace that has ever existed, what former ACTU Secretary Dave Oliver called a “liquid workforce” in which “workers bid for parcels of work where the lowest bid wins”.
Another technological innovation has been the extensive use of robots in many industries. In warehouses, they’re increasingly used to lift heavy packages and speed up goods collection and distribution. A bonus for workers, you’d think. But as a recent dispute over wages and conditions at Woolworth’s NSW and Victorian distribution centres illustrates, it’s anything but a bonus. Workers are still needed—but fewer of them. And those who keep their jobs are treated as if they were robots too. Workers’ every action is measured by an algorithmic program; through individual headsets, they receive barking orders. Anyone who’s seconds behind scheduled performance goals is reminded immediately by the machine.
Over the centuries, our society has been transformed for the better by new technologies. Millions more people are working in thousands of new areas, many with higher wages, higher-level skills and the possibility of shorter hours. Some of the massive and positive changes from technology include the thousands of new jobs involved in life-saving medical research, such as mRNA vaccines, 3-D printing, amazing possibilities in film and music and previously unimagined social connectivity through the internet. Robotics have saved workers from repetitive, dead-end jobs on production lines or dangerous mining jobs, such as in Australia’s Pilbara region, where driverless trucks and trains are controlled from a comfortable office command centre in Perth thousands of kilometres away.
Yet, despite the new openings, thousands of jobs, such as those of car workers or truck and train drivers in the Pilbara, have disappeared, with many workers unable to find equivalent employment or facing long-term unemployment. And many of the new jobs are just as repetitive. Even if they might be physically less taxing, they can still be mind numbing, stressful and exhausting. Often, technology that enables easier work is used to police the workers. John Pane from Electronic Frontiers Australia compares the latest workplace digitisation to a panopticon: “You never know whether the boss is watching you, which is why it’s called bossware”.
Social scientist David Graeber recalls an optimistic time in the twentieth century: “[W]hen people imagined the future, they imagined flying cars, teleportation devices and robots who would free them from the need to work”. But his exposé of today’s workplaces, Bullshit Jobs: The rise of pointless work and what we can do about it, shows that technology has often been marshalled to find ways to make us work more, not less, and often in roles that people experience as pointless “make-work” jobs.
The transition process during major technological innovation can be brutal. Karl Marx pointed out nearly 200 years ago that the loss of jobs in one sector and the creation of jobs in another is no seamless process. In the Grundrisse, he wrote, “[T]he effect of machinery, which has been represented as a compensation for the working class, is, on the contrary, a most frightful scourge”. He added that during the transition period, those thrown out of work have few options, rarely having the skills necessary for the newer technology, except for “a few inferior and therefore oversupplied and underpaid” jobs.
So why aren’t workers seeing the full benefits of new technologies?
It’s all about our economic system, capitalism. From the game-changing industrial revolution of the 1800s with its mechanised factories, railways and electricity to today’s predicted equally transformative “fourth” artificial intelligence-led revolution, there’s been a debate over the pros and cons of each new technological change. More importantly, the question has been who controls their introduction and use and who benefits.
It's not a question decided by what’s fair and reasonable. The economy is not simply a mechanical composite of individual parts such as labour, land, technology and machinery; it is fundamentally about the social relations between the people involved in producing, distributing and consuming things. Within capitalism, it’s about the competing interests of the two main classes in society: the ruling class, which owns and controls the productive processes to reap the profits and other benefits of each innovation, and the working class, which produces, but does not own or control, the goods and services.
It’s an economic system that sets employers and workers at odds over the control of production (what we do on the job): whether profit or human need will determine its goals.
As Marx explained, capitalism is focused on making profits in a system where each capitalist competes against others to be more profitable or go out of business. This dynamic encourages constant technological advances aimed at driving up productivity and delivering more profit. But each development of new machinery also intensifies exploitation and discipline of the workforce—increasing management control, deskilling labour, and increasing alienation for the majority.
Crucial to capitalism’s wresting control of the work process from the earlier skilled guilds of feudal society was redesigning workplaces to be independent of the talents workers brought with them. In the 1800s, economist Frederick Taylor’s “time and motion” studies provided the underlying redesign template by splitting tasks into small, discrete steps to be repetitively operated by a single worker. As Taylor explained in The Principles of Scientific Management: “Our original objective was that of taking control of the machine shop out of the hands of the many workmen and placing it completely in the hands of management”.
But in the end, the bosses can’t completely deskill or fire all workers. Initially, as each technological advance is introduced, employers can be even more reliant on workers’ skills or numbers. For example, Victoria is reportedly facing a shortage of 64,000 financial services and IT professionals, as well as blue-collar trades jobs.
Workers are often portrayed as anti-technology in their battles with employers over the introduction of automated systems. But the 2023 US screenwriters dispute tells a different story. The screenwriters didn’t oppose the use of generative AI such as ChatGPT in script writing. Instead, they secured an agreement that such AI scripts can’t be recognised as producers of the text and that human writers get the credit and payment for any studio AI-produced drafts, along with other protections. In Australia, the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance is fighting for similar conditions and protections on the use of AI.
Under the first Trump administration, Google workers forced management to withdraw from the $10 billion Project Maven military project and agree not to take on other such work. Google’s boss dumped the agreement within days of the 2025 Trump ascendancy, and now the workers face another fight.
Ultimately, workers retain enormous potential power because they produce the value that underpins company profits. There can never be a completely robotised, AI-driven society: human labour and ingenuity are foundational to human society. It’s just a question of who controls the labour and ingenuity and to what ends. Workers will have to continue their long tradition of organising against the encroachment of capitalist destruction and build the forces necessary to finally win society over to one in which human need, not profit, is the deciding factor.
