According to ILNA and quoted by CBSNEWS, as Labor Day is celebrated in the United States, {Labor Day is not May Day in the United States} California labor unions warned about the consequences of the rapid spread of artificial intelligence and automation on the future of employment and labor rights. Labor leaders gathered in San Francisco on Friday and called on California Governor Gavin Newsom to sign nine bills passed by lawmakers designed to regulate the use of artificial intelligence in the workplace. According to labor activists, without binding regulations, companies are using artificial intelligence to replace human resources, increase evaluative supervision and even assess work qualifications to hire, fire and punish workers.
Artificial intelligence, a tool for psychological suppression and violation of labor privacy: Unions’ concerns are not limited to job losses; algorithmic tools are already putting unprecedented psychological pressure on subordinates by assessing employees’ behavior in real time, replacing human evaluation. Nicole Palin, a longtime call center employee at a large hospital, is a concrete example of this modern exploitation. The hospital where she works uses “emotion detection” software to monitor her interactions with patients. Palin says the software displays on-screen warnings about a lack of “emotional empathy” during sensitive and emergency conversations with patients, an approach that disrupts her focus on patients’ health and is downright discriminatory.
Employers use technology to reduce and cheapen labor: The experience of workers like Palin shows that the uncontrolled introduction of technology directly targets basic labor rights. Peter Fein, a leader of the Teamsters, insists that big companies are introducing AI technology with the aim of automating and displacing workers.
In this regard, Steve Seltzer, at a rally titled “Stop AI” in front of Kaiser Permanente Hospital in San Francisco, called the current situation an existential crisis for the working class and called for a halt to this trend. Capital-oriented view, the need for workers to adapt to new conditions: On the other hand, some labor market experts have a different view. Michael Bernick, former head of the California Employment Development Agency, believes that workers should increase their skills instead of worrying. He points to the unprecedented speed of the penetration of AI and says that the data from the past few months does not yet show a huge wave of job destruction in California. However, unions respond that policymakers should not wait for a catastrophe and widespread unemployment.
The need to maintain human oversight and defend workers’ right to protest: These nine bills are now on the California governor’s desk, needing only his signature to become law. Emphasizing the need to prohibit “AI bosses” from firing or punishing workers, Lorna Gonzalez, president of the California Federation of Labor (AFL-CIO), has focused on one of the most fundamental labor rights: the right to human oversight, to be informed of the reasons for administrative decisions, and to be able to legally challenge them. If algorithms decide whether to continue employment without human oversight, workers’ right to protest would be effectively taken away. The California governor has until September 30 to sign or veto these critical bills, a decision that will draw the line between technology serving humanity and the new exploitation of workers.
Explanation Against Capital
The critique of the above text requires detailed discussion. The tendency to abolish wages and the anti-capitalist approach of workers has done and will do this in a heavy volume. From the anti-human role of capitalism that uses industry and technology to exploit and suppress the thoughts and psyche of workers!! to the forced depletion of labor market experts and in fact the thinkers of the capitalist class from any amount of human intelligence and finally the role of labor unions that throughout the twentieth century have had no other work than to shroud and bury the anti-capitalist campaign of the working masses in the cemetery of the survival of wage slavery. Enough has been said about all this. What we can say here and in the space of a telegram explanation is a warning to the working masses that “the house is in ruins.” The problem is absolutely not that we are only faced with a deficit and lack of supervision by “human beings” over artificial intelligence. Capitalism is by its very nature an anti-human mode of production, economic and social relations, a form of production in which the sole aim is to make ever more galactic profits and self-aggrandizement without any restraint on capital, sacrificing humanity on the verge of ever more monstrous profits for capital. When the aim of production is not humans but rather the sacrifice of humans for ever more monstrous profits, it is clear that all of technology, industry, robots and artificial intelligence are also responsible for playing the same role. It “massively slaughters” workers and humans in general for the ever more skyrocketing profits of capital. Trade unions not only have no objection to the existence of this man-killing octopus, but they have been and are among the guardians of its survival. Here too, they shamelessly suggest that the problem is simply a lack of adequate supervision of the workings of technology and artificial intelligence. Industry, robots and artificial intelligence can certainly be placed more and more effectively in the service of human welfare, needlessness, health, development and glorious growth. This depends on the destruction of capitalism, the domination of the conscious council of humanity over the fate of its work, production and life, requires the establishment of an organized movement of the international council against capitalism, requires a clear and conscious orientation of the living, present and everywhere ongoing struggles of the workers of the world in this direction. The unions are against this and ultimately deceive the workers into depending on the "law" and "responsible" to reduce the losses caused by the lack of control of artificial intelligence!!
Anti-capitalist workers with the prospect of abolishing wage labour September 9, 2026