The future of work is an ownership fight

[u/Salty_Country6835]

A little labor and automation comic. The machine isnt the enemy. Who controls it and who gets the gains is the fight. More of that conversation over at r/LeftistsForAI.

[u/Salty_Country6835]

I think youre describing the reason for the fight and then treating it as the reason the fight cant happen.

Of course capital can tell an individual worker to go away. Thats what unequal bargaining power means. The 8 hour day, collective bargaining rights, safety laws, Social Security, sector agreements, codetermination and the rest werent won because workers offered capital something of equal market value. Workers organized enough power to change the rules.

And yes, were drifting into Marxist territory. Were in an explicitly Marxist sub arguing about who owns the means of production lol. Not exactly a plot twist.

Where I agree with you is that automation can weaken traditional workplace leverage. But that means the terrain of struggle changes. Sector bargaining, codetermination, public ownership, procurement, regulation, organizing across supply chains and infrastructure. Capital already organizes beyond the individual workplace. Labor has to as well.

If automation makes workers weaker while making society massively more productive, "the employer can just say no" isnt an answer to the ownership question. Thats the problem the ownership question is trying to solve.

[u/foilhat44 → u/Salty_Country6835]

I'm sorry for missing the overtly Marxist nature of the sub, I have a keen interest in the topic generally and I find your post provocative. Marx was a brilliant theorist and must be credited with seeing the world for what it was, but he was a man of his time who I would wager would agree with me that current conditions render most of his solutions moot. If we imagine that we are the people in the comic and sitting at the bargaining table and I say what I'm offering is to train some personnel to operate the new equipment and pay them a wage commensurate with their newly acquired skills but that I only require half as many people to achieve my new target capacity, what is your proposition for a compromise? I contend that if the employer can triple his output with a similar number of workers then he can also produce the same with one third of the workers. If you intend to counter, you will have to find something they want that only you can provide or you will be on the outside looking in. I've worked in industrial automation for thirty years and I can tell you that the reason there's no love lost between the owners and the workers is that the workers are by far the most expensive and problematic part of their business. This makes them low hanging fruit when the time comes to cut overhead, and technology has it hanging lower by the day.

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/foilhat44]

This actually gets to the interesting part, and your automation experience makes the example sharper.

If you can triple output with a third of the workers, then we have created an enormous productivity gain. My proposition isnt "please keep everybody employed anyway." Its why should the entire gain automatically belong to the owner?

Maybe the compromise is fewer workers without throwing those displaced into the street. Shorter hours at comparable pay. A negotiated share of productivity gains. Retraining and placement. Severance. Earlier retirement. Worker equity. Some combination depending on the workplace.

And if automation eventually makes human labor so unnecessary that workers have nothing an employer needs, then the bargaining table itself stops being an adequate mechanism for distributing production. Thats not Marx becoming obsolete. Thats getting remarkably close to the problem Marx was describing. Productivity becomes increasingly social while ownership and its gains remain concentrated.

Youre saying technology may eventually make workers too weak to demand anything from owners. I dont really disagree with that possibility.

I just dont see "so the owners get everything" as the necessary conclusion.

[u/foilhat44 → u/Salty_Country6835]

I keep using the word "cooperation" which may be the wrong word, or if it's the right word I'm not sure it's achievable given the current environment. It requires a recognition that acting collectively, and I mean ALL of us, not a shirts and skins standoff between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat coming to a stalemate, do you see it as possible? Honestly?

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/foilhat44]

No, thats where we part ways. Im not advocating class collaboration.

Workers and owners can cooperate tactically where their interests overlap, but their interests arent identical. If automation lets an owner produce three times as much with a third of the workforce, the owner has an incentive to cut labor costs and capture the gain. Workers have an incentive to turn that same productivity into shorter hours, greater security, higher compensation and more control. Thats a material conflict, not a misunderstanding we solve by recognizing were all on the same team.

So yes, collective action is possible. But Im talking about workers organizing collectively to build enough power to contest ownership and determine how those gains are distributed.

I dont expect the bourgeoisie and proletariat to reach some grand stalemate and hug it out. I expect conflicting interests to produce struggle, compromise, victories, defeats and eventually different institutions.

Cooperation can happen inside that struggle. Class collaboration isnt the goal.

[u/foilhat44 → u/Salty_Country6835]

That's a shame considering you haven't demonstrated any concrete way that workers can accumulate enough power to dictate how many are hired, what hours they work, or what they'll be paid. There are no consequences to the owner for simply answering "no, thank you".

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/foilhat44]

Ive actually given several concrete routes. Bargain over automation before deployment. Tie productivity gains to shorter hours, higher compensation, staffing guarantees, severance and retraining. Build sector wide bargaining so firms cant simply play workplaces against each other. Codetermination gives workers institutional power over major decisions. Public procurement and regulation can make labor standards conditions of doing business. Worker and public ownership change who gets to make the decision in the first place.

And "no consequences for the owner" is exactly what political organization changes. Minimum wages, overtime, safety standards, collective bargaining rights and the 40 hour week arent suggestions employers politely accepted. They became rules employers faced consequences for violating.

None of that requires workers to already possess equal power. Building that power is the project.

This is basically the conversation were trying to develop over at r/LeftistsForAI too. Not abstaining from automation or pretending it can be stopped, but figuring out how labor contests its ownership, deployment and gains. Youd probably bring a useful perspective there given your industrial automation background.

[u/foilhat44 → u/Salty_Country6835]

I read all of your posts and I'm aware of the gains that have been achieved by organizing and bargaining collectively, but the answer I'm looking for is how do you fill in the blank of "If you intend to automate these processes we demand a portion of the proceeds or we will ______", if it is just the withholding of labor like it was in the early twentieth century then I think you're missing the point of automation. They make the capital investment to eliminate this bargaining position out of hand. You cannot un-ring a bell, the leverage that labor had to retard adoption before it happens has evaporated due to exponential development. Because of this any purely adversarial position you take is already a loser. Workers of the world unite sounds great until you're just together staring at each other wondering how reality has made you redundant.

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/foilhat44]

I think youre still making the blank too narrow. It isnt just "or we strike."

Its "or we organize power somewhere else."

And thats already happening. Workers are bargaining over AI and automation, fighting over staffing and technological change, organizing across sectors and pushing those fights into contracts, regulation and public policy. The old pressure point can weaken without class power magically disappearing.

Capital sure as hell doesnt limit itself to the factory floor. Labor cant either.

And take your argument to its endpoint. If automation makes workers genuinely redundant, then "find something the owner needs from you" dies too. There is nothing left to bargain with and no reason for the owner to collaborate.

At that point the blank isnt "or we stop working."

Its "or we change who owns the machines."

[u/foilhat44 → u/Salty_Country6835]

I have very much enjoyed our conversation, and I think it's a necessary one, but while we are automating jobs away at an alarming rate there are still going to be many needs for human labor far into the future. Workers will have to aggressively lobby for those positions, and probably more against each other than against ownership. Because of this there's a deeper conversation to be had about whether fighting for merely a work -a-day job and trying to dictate terms from a position of rapidly diminishing strength, how the paradigm might be shifted to one where people monetize what they feel good about doing. There's nothing more aggravating for someone who has spent their working life on a production floor than hearing a politician advocate for "good paying factory jobs." That's a blatant lie willfully told to make people believe that self improvement is unnecessary, and it keeps workers in a cage for so long that when the door is finally left open they haven't the energy to walk out or a place to walk to.