Labor Unions Can Counterbalance the Big Tech Oligarchy, But Only If They Rediscover Their Power

William Burns is a fellow at Tech Policy Press. This post is part of a series of contributor perspectives and analyses called "The Coming Age of Tech Trillionaires and the Challenge to Democracy." Learn more about the call for contributions here, and read other pieces in the series as they are published here.

The recent biopic of Enrico Berlinguer — Italy’s iconic Communist leader — gave embattled European leftists a nostalgic taste of organized labor at the zenith of its transformative power. In the 1970s, Berlinguer’s Partito Comunista Italiano was the biggest political party in the Western world. Its power sprung directly from more than a million militants — a sovereign oppositional force which, through coordinated strikes, protests and workplace sabotage, put bosses and government officials on the ropes. As Berlinguer’s character says ingeniously to a political opponent: “It's not me you have to convince, but all Italian workers.”

Today, times have clearly changed. Berlinguer’s moral fortitude is unrecognizable in contemporary politics. Nor is there any known sovereign oppositional force. In this environment, oligarchs are thriving, particularly in the tech sector.

How could we build a world in which organized labor once again served as a counterweight to oligarchy? And what can reexamination of labor’s past reactions to automation and digital technology tell us about what is needed now?

Handbuilt by robots

Our story begins at the iconic Fiat automotive factory in Turin, Italy. It had once been the core of Europe’s post-World War II boom and fiercely contested territory for the workers’ struggle. Since at least 1960, Fiat managers had been obsessed with computers and robotics. This early experiment in digitization produced complicated results on the shop floor. Robots initially bottlenecked production lines at crucial points. Components would pile up, requiring more human labor to finish the job, in what was described as a “vicious cycle” of falling productivity. In the mid-1970s, Fiat introduced the “Robogate” system — a world’s first in which a giant machine assembled cars at incredible speed — in theory, an automatic factory that eliminated the need for blue-collar workers. This new system was regularly presented as the epitome of Italian genius — a TV commercial under the slogan “Handbuilt by Robots” and soundtracked with opera laid it on thickly (see archive film on YouTube). But the new system actually brought another set of production problems due to suboptimal performance, with the system lying idle.

In 1980, it was against this background, invested in technological bells and whistles and facing heavy American and Japanese competition, that Fiat ordered tens of thousands of layoffs. Unlike today, however, there was a seemingly powerful labor movement that stood in the way. ‘Seemingly,’ because a strike opposing the layoffs collapsed after about a month. Managers split the unions with differential redundancy offers for workers who walked voluntarily. They also isolated labor leaders with a white collar counterprotest that resonated in a country worn down by political violence and instability.

Automation had initially been greeted with enthusiasm by Fiat’s unions because it made work cleaner and safer (such as not applying paint by hand), but workers were also, correctly, concerned that jobs would be lost. They even came up with alternative plans to modernize the company. How could labor solidarity suddenly collapse, revealing Italy’s militants to be little more than paper tigers?

Despite my efforts to understand why, I have yet to come across a completely satisfying answer (although you can read many speculations). The historian Matt Myers, who recently published a book on the topic, places the collapse within the broader psychological zeitgeist of the European left. “The factory…no longer provided guidance for a programme of social transformation won through collective action,” Myers writes, adding that “One of the major casualties of this process of transformation was the Italian workers’ movement’s belief that it embodied the direction of history.” An important insight, because it suggests the original sin was mental and intellectual, a sudden decline in confidence emblematic of the fickle nature of mass emotion, yet all the more shocking because it took place in a movement known for its grit.

Fiat later became the symbol of supposed changes in manufacturing due to automation. The strike was also seen as a staging post in deindustrialization and part of the neoliberal attack on organized labor in the Western world (the collapse of worker power was obviously not restricted to Italy, citing Reaganomics and Thatcherism). However, the full context is lacking, and conventional accounts of the period might be missing telling details. Automotive plants have never been a good example of production in general despite the big library of writing about them from business schools. In reality, production processes were extremely varied, as were probably labor relations, and we lack a broader history of how manufacturing changed during this period. The intertwining strands of analysis and the coincidence of digital technology with political, economic, and social change, therefore, make it difficult to draw specific lessons, beyond the obvious of directing activists to focus on mental state and encourage affirmation rather than despair.

Crisis and choice

The 1970s and early 1980s were times of economic crisis throughout the Western world. Then, as now, “microelectronics” came to be seen as a way out of the crisis. Let’s take another tack and ask how a cross-section of Europe’s progressives thought about digital technology at that time, starting with Berlinguer, who believed that microelectronics were both probable reinforcers of “the military-industrial complex” but also had the potential to enrich “the whole civilization” with knowledge. Because of the membership of his party, the white collar workers who designed IT systems were potential sympathizers of the party as much as their blue-collar comrades. This seemed to open up the possibility of genuine worker-led design and implementation of technology. Yet it was perhaps also a mistaken doctrine to think any good would come out of digitization. Franco Debenedetti, joint managing director of the computer firm Olivetti, gave the Italian capitalists’ game away when he reportedly said that “information technology is basically a technology of coordination and control of the labor force, the white collar workers, which Taylorization does not cover.”

Contemporaneous with developments at Fiat, the British think tank Radical Science Journal Collective plotted an alternative world that was equally high tech but nurtured society. The world had almost become reality at the Lucas Aerospace Corporation due to Irish engineer Mike Cooley and his colleagues. However, Lucas bosses poured cold water on what was dubbed ‘The Lucas Plan,’ and the think tank seems to have concluded that control of innovation through workers—and workers in control of innovation—was impossible. While scientific research to develop worker-centered technology was in theory within reach, it took too long building up capacity, required engineers to rethink their conservative, hierarchical mindset and—even if results were promising—could not compete against the parallel efforts of capitalists.

It was a hopeless prophecy rooted in the UK’s science-obsessed political culture, now reeling from lethal political violence under industrial chemist turned Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. It could, however, be faulted for making the perfect the enemy of the good. In Scandinavia, a softer approach was quite deliberately contemplated by some governments, driven by concerns over high rates of unemployment, comprehensive welfare states that carried the costs, and labour unions worried about jobs. Sweden, ruled by leftist Olof Palme, is the major example. His government implemented a “Renewal Fund” which took 10% of the 1984 profits of companies to be set aside for research and training regarding implementation of new technologies. Spending was delegated to the company level —comprising a joint committee of managers and employees. There is no easy way to know how successful these schemes were and whether they could be replicated in other parts of the world, but Palme worked along a credible track with his staunch support for organized labor, until he was assassinated in 1986.

Solution space widens, then narrows

As computers became cheaper through the late 1970s into the 1990s, they took on a less monopolistic form that briefly suggested yet another kind of future, perhaps no “better” than our current one but definitely more multidirectional in terms of political power. It therefore offered a widening of the solution space, which newer academic research has brought into focus. This included a Balkan “Silicon Valley” that was established under the Communist regime in Bulgaria and built upon “reverse-engineered Apple clones” running “a direct copy of MS-DOS.” These and other Bulgarian machines played a notable early role in equipping the Global Majority with computers, but the effects were also deeply uneven. “The Bulgarian Communist Party was creating [digital] social databases of its population by the 1970s, but some Bulgarians were beyond the reach even of the electrical grid,” the historian Victor Petrov wrote. “The age of Edison was beyond them, let alone the information age.”

In other European conditions, like the former Yugoslavia with its heritage of a socialist market economy, worker-led modernization actually happened. A study of a cooperatively owned factory in Croatia, by the anthropologist Ognjen Kojanić, suggests that maintaining a mix of old, outdated, machines (as well as new computerized equipment) gave the factory the flexibility to undertake short production runs that were uneconomic for fully-automated German competitors. As chaotic deindustrialization took hold, the workers kept their jobs, albeit at lower wages.

Shock doctrine policies after the end of the Soviet Union in 1991 disrupted the Communist-era lockstep between science, research, and industrial production, undermining, although not completely destroying, this IT sector in eastern Europe. But the ability of large American computer firms to protect their ascendancy—IP management stateside and hardware manufacture in greater China—doomed otherwise credible European competitors. The story is, of course, a global one, and assembly and maintenance of computers were also burgeoning in the Global South through this period. In some of these cases, cynical ‘Structural Adjustment’ programs were the wrecking ball in the world of science and technology.

In the 1980s, the United States federal government launched the SEMATECH program among other measures that shepherded the restructuring of Silicon Valley and gave the semiconductor industry a new lease of life. Despite being little known, this program is one of the major achievements of Reagan-era industrial policy. In Europe, public IT projects were bigger than even the current EU Chips Act (citing recent comments made by a former European official). The digital dream was central to policy through the 1990s and into the turn of the millennium. It was championed by President Bill Clinton and his colleagues such as the (then) European Commissioner for science, Philippe Busquin and British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

This is not to say there was no opposition, but it was ineffective. For example, there were attacks on mainframe computers, but they became mere footnotes in the annals of law enforcement. Félix Tréguer, a political theorist, identifies a later “moral panic” in the face of “transnational” hackers that led governments to take increasingly punitive measures against hacking and other forms of digital sabotage through the 1990s. Objections to technology were also raised in arguably peripheral areas such as privacy and data protection and, persistently, against transport automation such as computerized cockpits and driverless cars and trains.

As much as we can know, however, penetration of IT into most workplaces was unchallenged. The expansion of broadband was a crucial helper. It was backed with a wall of money including billions in taxpayer funds although, even then, industry experts said more had to be spent to achieve the “Gigabit Society.” Opportunity cost was not even an afterthought. It is remarkable how over not much more than two decades, digital technology had gone from something that at least in theory ought to be shaped by workers to a force ultimately under the control of a handful of powerful individuals.

Responding to AI

The late academic and progressive activist, David F. Noble, commenting in the mid-1990s, considered the goal of “taming” tech a fundamental strategic error that prevented activists from seeing computers for what they really were: brutal class war. His advice, which resonates today with AI, was to fight their implementation at all costs and preferably in ways that also humiliated the C-suite—advice he followed himself and that led to him being repeatedly fired by his employers.

History seems to have proven Noble correct. Even mainstream economic studies called into question the idea that IT had macroeconomic benefits. Rather, increases in metrics like productivity accrued only in the firms selling the IT, not in the wider economy. Certainly, there was little evidence of a spectacular leap forward following the widespread adoption of computers. An argument has been made that economists misread the complex relationships between technology and production in ways convenient for capital but detrimental for social progress. In other words, “ragged-trousered philanthropists” —an ironic term for the working class coined by Irish writer Robert Noonan—sacrificed their jobs but reaped nothing for the “greater” good.

In the past, clashes of views about “what to do about science and technology” underpinned a voluminous written critique that has, regrettably, been mostly forgotten. One crucial split was between Marxists who saw technology as great in theory but currently under the wrong management, and anarchists who believed the two qualities functionally inseparable and in need of general smashing. Marxists, in turn, saw anarchists and Luddites as counter-revolutionaries who, by stalling the march of technocapitalism were thereby stalling its downfall. Many of these ideas seem quite dated today but they still hover above our present critique of the digital world, often mixed up, and rarely labeled as such. If there is a dominant ideology on the progressive end of politics, it is now somewhat indistinguishable from the ideology of Big Tech. This, to my mind, illustrates the folly of thinking about digital technology without first taking into account actual power relationships.

Noble, the academic and activist, saw globalization as a potential source of strength because workers around the world experienced the same problems and therefore might find new solidarity. This would extend to transnational collective bargaining and even strikes and sabotage that pummeled the entire production process and brought uncooperative bosses to their knees. He also saw the moment when a new technology was introduced into the workplace as the supreme opportunity for subversion because the device was still a prototype that even the bosses could not fully understand. This window would close, he wrote, when the technology had been debugged. Yet we are no closer to transnational labor militancy than we were when he published those ideas. Digital technology long ago bedded down and therefore would be harder to dislodge.

Breaking the bonds of history

France’s Hiatus group revived the idea of a tech moratorium with a statement this February: “The proliferation of AI may seem inevitable. Still, we don’t want to give up. Against the strategy of the fait accompli, against the blind-sided arguments that impose and legitimize its deployment, we demand democratic control over this technology and a drastic limitation of its uses.” Outside the world of digital devices, stopping the use of technology has been a standard response to dangers, including in the workplace, where health and safety made inroads. But if the French initiative gained traction, it would be an extraordinary departure from the pattern of the past decades.

The idea could only take hold if there was a transformative mechanism of labor militancy to enforce it. That mechanism would obviously not look like the old one. It would require a radical rethink of goals within the labor movement—an enormous task that would necessarily become the business of the next decade. The left would have to find a common basis for action across complicated systems of production, consumption and waste “disposal.” But there is a sense that choices are getting starker.

Former US President Biden and Vice President Harris apparently understood the importance of labor unions. Biden was of the older generation of progressives that grew up with unions as an ascendent force. He instinctively cultivated them as a powerbase. Now, however, we might see old reactionary factions in labor coming to the fore again. The civil rights movement, not labor unions, was the notable progressive force in the mid-century US.

Across the Atlantic, in France, prominent union leader Sophie Binet pushed back against splits among workers in her own country with the statement that “trade unionism is the best antidote to the extreme right, because it brings people together on the basis of demands at work. I am truly very struck, when we go into the workplace, in the struggles there, we don't give a damn about color and religion, we don't even talk about them.” The labor sociologist Karel Yon expressed skepticism—unionism was never “spontaneously anti-racist” (as Yon claimed Binet implied with her statement). But Yon nevertheless saw opportunities to build up progressive thinking as part of growing militancy in French labor unions. The “united front” ticket of France’s leftist parties (and the greens) was quite successful in the last parliamentary election. It followed a period of regrouping in the wake of the ‘yellow vest’ and Extinction Rebellion protests in 2018.

Innovative actions that reinforce progressive thinking in labor unions, reward civic courage, cause consternation among bosses and open up the solution space through transnational militancy will always be worth their weight in gold. Resistance against oligarchs and Big Tech cannot be a subtopic in the wider reconstruction of social democracy, but one of its main cases. I believe a lack of militancy in relation to automation and digital technology over past decades tells us organized labor is the crucial missing counterweight.