Episode 18: Tech and Labor

As AI accelerates into the labor market, many Americans are wondering what the future of work will hold, and whether history offers any guidance. In this episode of Democracy Deciphered, host Shannon Lynch is joined by New America’s Amanda Ballantyne to explore how past technological transitions reshaped work, why some communities were left behind, and what it would mean to build a truly worker-centered approach to innovation today.

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Transcript

Amanda Ballantyne: And we are right now, I believe, suffering the consequences of those types of decisions around deindustrialization and leaving people behind. I think at the time there was an assumption that everyone could just move and get a new job or get new training and their lives would be left whole. And we found that that's in fact not the case.

Shannon Lynch: Technological change has always reshaped how people work, but its benefits and burdens have never been shared equally. As AI moves rapidly into the labor market, many Americans are questioning whether their jobs could disappear altogether. What does history reveal about when governments have succeeded or failed in supporting workers through major technological transitions? And what does it mean to treat workers as true partners in innovation and build a transition for the future. Welcome to Democracy Deciphered. Where we unpack the history, headlines, and hopes of American democracy. I'm your host, Shannon Lynch. Today, I'm joined by New America's Amanda Ballantyne to discuss how technological shifts affect America's workforce. Amanda Ballantyne is a Senior Fellow for Workers and Technology at New America and a visiting scholar at MIT's Stone Center for Inequality and Shaping the Future of Work, a leading expert on how emerging technologies affect workers. She previously served as the founding executive director at the AFL-CIO Technology Institute and led the AFL-CIO Working for America Institute, where she collaborated with unions and advocates to guide public and private leaders on AI and its impact on workers' rights, job security, and safety. She has testified before Congress and advised the White House and federal agencies on worker-centered approaches to technology and workforce development. Valentine also serves as an advisor to Carnegie Mellon's Block Center for Technology and Society and was a member of the National Artificial Intelligence Advisory Committee. She has more than 20 years of experience in organizing, policy, and law. Amanda, thanks so much for joining me.

Amanda Ballantyne: Thanks Shannon for having me. It's really a pleasure to be with you today.

Shannon Lynch: Okay, so getting us started here, looking across American history, what major technological shifts stand out to you as turning points and how people worked and why were some communities left behind during these transitions?

Amanda Ballantyne: I think it's a really important question for this moment in time. And there have been sort of major shifts that are brought on by technology and other major shifts that were brought on sort of by political economy or economic decisions. I might just start by saying electrification, you know, around the turn of the 20th century. You had this technology that was very experimental and very powerful, electricity. The infrastructure for it hadn't necessarily been built yet. Neither had the regulations. So you had this sort of very powerful, very dangerous technology that had a lot of potential and it was unsafe. People died, installing it, trying to use it. And it really was this iterative process of sort of developing health and safety codes for how electricity could be installed and used and also building codes, right? And it was. Really unions in a lot of senses that were bringing the information about kind of how to manage this technology to the fore and figuring out really in partnership, how to make electricity become a ubiquitous general service technology. It had tremendous impacts on the way that we work. And I think a lot of times we think about that all happening just so quickly but actually it took a generation really for electrification. It also took significant public policy to make electrification and more democratic technology, right? There was no incentive really for electric companies to build out that last rural mile. There was incentive for electric company to really provide service to low income people. And so it took a lot of different actors to democratize it as a general service technology and one that we now rely on without even thinking about it. I think the other way to sort of think about big dramatic changes to look at the deindustrialization that happened. NAFTA and the global trade agreements that started moving in the late 70s, 80s, and 90s. In that case, we had very weak public policy responses to help people. And we ended up, I think there was a sort of general theory at the time that a rising tide would lift all boats and everybody could get a tech job and move to California, whatever, to make it work for their family. And what we learned is actually most people don't move. They can't move, they're connected to place in really important ways. And people did get left behind. And community is really cratered and it's been generations to rebuild. This has been my whole life. I grew up in rural Iowa. What we have to learn from those two different moments where there was big dramatic change is that we do actually need a pretty significant public policy response when we have the emergence of new technologies that have the potential to really reshape our economy. And that's what we need to be really talking about now. It's important to talk about guardrails to make sure that AI is safe. It's also really important to look deeply at the systems of government we have and whether they're appropriate to meet the moment of needing to be able to manage and democratize and make these technologies work for working people instead of increasing inequality in our society, which is really, you know, there's a lot of potential for that around these technologies.

Shannon Lynch: Gotcha. So, in a piece you wrote recently for the journal Issues in Science and Technology, you discussed worker-centered research and development that treats workers as design partners. Can you share one real example where this approach clearly improved the outcome for or for a company.

Amanda Ballantyne: Yeah. And I'm going to back up and just explain what we mean a little bit when we're talking about engaging workers in the innovation process. In our economy now, there's a significant amount of public investment that's put into generating innovations. And part of that is scientific research that happens at universities or in partnerships with firms. Part of that is done through economic development initiatives that are trying to sort of spur new industries in different places. And one of the things that is a sort of major theme of industrial transformation is what is the role of workers in those types of policies and programs. In the United States, there's been tremendous, at least since World War II, tremendous investment in technological development, public investment. And there's a been a quite cozy relationship between tech firms, universities, and their startup communities, and government investment. Workers have frequently been engaged, at least in official capacity, sort of after the technology has developed and as it starts to roll out and be commercialized. So part of the conversation we're having about innovation is really how do you upstream worker voice in technology development? There are many, many moments in the tech development process that happen before technology is commercialized in I mean, the argument here is that workers have a tremendous amount of knowledge. They really understand workplace technology, how it works, and also how it doesn't work. They understand what technology creates better working conditions, fairer working conditions safer working conditions for them. And that that knowledge is really valuable. It's valuable from a scientific perspective and it's valuable from an industrial development and relations perspective. And so part of the conversation we're having is In addition to opportunities through labor management partnerships or through collective bargaining agreements, how do we really capture the knowledge and engage working people as partners in identifying the challenges that technology should be developed to solve and kind of helping shape technology in that way? There are many, many examples throughout history. And I talked about this briefly before the advent of electricity. You look at sort of like a history of the Tennessee Valley Authority, which is a major public works project in the 30s and 40s, what you had was really a lot of union engagement in the in the sort of, like, build out of the technology. And through there, there was a real iterative process about how to develop the technology to make it safe and to make efficient. And so that's a very rich history where you see, you know, partnerships really between the federal government, and certainly the Army Corps and labor unions of skilled. Craftspeople who were really sort of working together. It's a collaboration that is tough and challenging, but still it was that collaboration that I think was pivotal in the sort of expansion of electricity in the US.

Shannon Lynch: What role should the government play in supporting workers during periods of rapid technological change? And how does this idea of a just transition fit into that?

Amanda Ballantyne: So I think this is a good question for the period of time we're in now, too. There's a concept called Just Transition that really comes out of the conversation around climate change. And the idea is that if you want workers in a democratic society to support major initiatives to shift, to make industrial changes, which we need if we're going to actually respond to the threats of climate change, you have to engage them and really leave them whole. So when you're thinking about. For example, sunsetting the coal mining industry, that would be very good for climate change, right? But for the working people in the communities that are attached to those mines that have been doing that work for generations, it's terrible. I mean, it's a death knell. And I would say you have similar challenges with industrial farming, like a lot of big industries. And this is true also for the deindustrialization that happened around global trade. Many people were just left behind. And we are right now, I believe suffering the consequences of those types of decisions around deindustrialization and leaving people behind. I think at the time there was an assumption that everyone could just move and get a new job or get new training and their lives would be left whole. And we found that that's in fact not the case. And we have a very frayed society and a very unequal society now because of that. Big implications for democracy. The idea of a just transition, again, is about building in real strategies that empower workers to make the changes and the industrial changes that they need in order to make that change in the economy. It could mean bargaining over the impacts of how a plant closure may impact a community, but in other senses it means negotiating the expansion of new industries in areas and then also making sure that workers have access. To the training and knowledge they need to actually get into those industries. It means making sure the new jobs that workers are getting are as good as the old jobs that they left. There's an example, actually from the Biden administration that a colleague of mine talks about often, where in a city there was a sort of incumbent auto plant and it paid $35 an hour to its workers. And right across the street, there was an electric auto plant being built. And the wages offered at that electric auto plant were $18 an hour. And so if that's the future that you're offering workers, like you can work in a clean industry for half the amount of money that you used to make at your old job, that's not a win for workers. And so I think that when we think about the potential for big industrial change related to AI, those are the questions we have to be asking. What do we do to create an unemployment system that is gonna sustain people, allow people to retrain and actually get people into good high quality family sustaining jobs in the new economy? That's a challenge. That's the greatest democratic challenge of our time right now. And I would say that we have the opportunity to really deliver on that challenge, but we have to step back from the hype of AI and we have start thinking systematically about how to kind of rebuild the infrastructure we have to help workers move through this type of change.

Shannon Lynch: Wow, that example of the EV factory versus the gas car, that's really stark. OK, so just moving us into our close here, looking ahead, what steps does the United States government need to take now to make sure workers are ready for the next wave of technological disruption, like beyond this current wave that we're seeing with generative AI?

Amanda Ballantyne: So there are a lot of steps that probably should be taken at the federal and the state level. It would be sort of hard to talk through all of them. But I think the key to this is to not look at one sector necessarily or one technology and to start thinking about creating economic support systems that support ongoing disruption and transition. Because different industries already have different sort of working structures and ways that workers relate to them. And different industries will have different types of impacts, right? We do know that entry-level employment seems to be being impacted by AI, and the sort of career ladders that were in place where people could sort of move either from, you know, high school or from college into new jobs are much more challenging for workers right now. And that's a pretty important issue to think about. But just upscaling and just training isn't really going to cut it. We know that some jobs in those entry-level spaces are going to become more about managing technology. We also know, though, that the skills that workers really are going to need to be able to navigate aren't necessarily hard tech skills, right? They're soft skills. They're negotiation skills. They're people skills. And so, sort of scaling back and just focusing on sort of STEM education isn't a great solution. We need to think about training systems more holistically and making sure that those training systems actually lead to real jobs. Union training programs are one example where there's a sort of job guarantee at the end through collective bargaining processes. But we also need to start thinking about, you know, people in the non-unionizable workforce or people who can't, for whatever reason, organize unions in their own places. Very, very tough to organize a union in the United States. So how do we start to recreate those career paths? That's a key question that we need to be asking right now. There are other questions about the safety net. How do you revamp an unemployment system so that workers have access to the types of family supports they need so that they can get training and they can involved in networking that will land them new jobs? And then also sort of how do you make sure that the industrial investments and the economic development investments are very closely tied in and worker centered instead of just sort of randomly related to individual employers in a region. There's a lot of work to be done. And I think step back thinking about how to pilot responsive projects to the, to the way that the industry is changing. And I, I think the thing that I would say more than anything is fostering labor management partnerships, fostering partnerships, tripartite partnerships between government business and worker organizations in regions is a really key strategy to make sure that all parties are being represented.

Shannon Lynch: Yeah, that's some really interesting food for thought. Well, Amanda, thank you so much for coming on and explaining all of this. Really, really appreciate you taking the time.

Amanda Ballantyne: It's been great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Trenton Cokley: This was a New America production. Our executive producer and host is Shannon Lynch. Our producers are Joe Wilkes, David Lanham, Joe DiNardi, Joel Rienstra, and Trenton Cokley. Social media by Maika Moulite. Visuals by Alex Briñas . Media outreach by Heidi Lewis. Please rate, review, and subscribe to Democracy Deciphered wherever you like to listen.