Welcome back to the CSLI Weekly Roundup, our weekly collection of what we’re reading and thinking about on worker power, labor standards, economic security, and new approaches to strengthening the middle class.
As we head into the Labor Day weekend, we’re taking a look at the growing power in big tech, a labor market losing momentum, and a couple of different perspectives on what workers want from the organizations representing them.
What We’re Reading
The data-center backlash comes to Virginia. Northern Virginia became the nation’s largest data-center market by offering technology companies generous tax incentives and access to an enormous supply of electricity. Now residents across the political spectrum are pushing back against higher utility bills, heavy water use, environmental damage, and projects that produce relatively few permanent jobs. Gabrielle Gurley traces how local organizing, court challenges, and public anger have begun changing the politics of an industry once welcomed almost without question. The fight raises a broader issue for states: what standards should businesses receiving substantial public support have to meet for workers and communities? Read “Take This Data Center and Shove It” in The American Prospect.
When corporations begin accumulating the powers of governments. Historian William Dalrymple looks to the British East India Company for a warning about today’s technology giants. The company began as a commercial enterprise before acquiring military, political, and governing power on a staggering scale. Dalrymple argues that Big Tech’s growing influence over information, public policy, national security, and critical infrastructure presents a modern version of the same underlying danger: corporations becoming powerful enough to shape the states charged with overseeing them. The history also offers a reminder that governments can reclaim that authority when political leaders decide to act. Read Dalrymple’s essay in The New York Times (gift link).
A worker-centered vision of technology, and the argument over it. In a wide-ranging interview about his new book, Nobel Prize-winning economist Daron Acemoglu argues that automation will not automatically produce broadly shared prosperity. His idea of “pro-worker AI” is technology that gives workers information and expertise that allow them to perform new or more sophisticated tasks, rather than simply replacing them. He does not propose having regulators decide which technologies qualify. Instead, he calls for changing the incentives, aspirations, and public policies guiding technological development. Read the transcript or watch “Daron Acemoglu on Liberalism, Automation, and the Educated Elite” from Conversations with Tyler.
Writing in Jacobin, Alberto Garzón places those ideas in the context of The Economist’s sharply critical treatment of Acemoglu’s work. Garzón agrees that Acemoglu’s proposals remain vague, but argues that the reaction reveals a deeper resistance to placing workers and shared prosperity at the center of economic policy. Taken together, the two pieces turn an abstract debate about technology into a more basic question: who gets to decide what innovation is for? Read “For The Economist, Mentioning Workers’ Interests Is Heresy” in Jacobin (free registration required).
The labor market keeps losing momentum. Private employers added just 38,000 jobs in August, according to ADP, falling short of economists’ expectations. Health care and education accounted for much of the growth, while manufacturing lost 17,000 jobs and professional and business services lost 16,000. The figures reinforce the picture of a slow-hire, slow-fire labor market in which workers have fewer opportunities to improve their wages or working conditions by changing jobs. Read more from Reuters.
Throwback Thursday
What do workers want from worker organizations?
In a 2017 large-scale survey of American workers published in 2022 by CSLI advisory board member Tom Kochan, Alexander Hertel-Fernandez, and William Kimball asked more than 4,000 workers what they wanted from an organization representing them. Workers valued organizations that could improve pay and working conditions, but they also showed substantial interest in portable benefits, training, job-search assistance, legal representation, and a voice in workplace decisions. In fact, respondents indicated they were often more willing to join and financially support organizations combining those functions than conventional organizations limited to the options generally available under current law. Read a freely available version of “What Forms of Representation Do American Workers Want?”.
A survey conducted in 2021 by the conservative think tank American Compass (whose leaders include CSLI advisory board members Oren Cass and Chris Griswold) approached some of the same questions from a distinctly right-of-center perspective. While the conclusions will differ from the views of many unionists, the findings overlap with Kochan and his coauthors in notable ways: workers expressed interest in organizations that provide concrete benefits and training, and many were open to forms of workplace voice that differ from the conventional union model. Read together, the surveys offer an instructive comparison of how researchers with different starting points interpret workers’ appetite for new institutions. Read American Compass’s “Not What They Bargained For: Worker Attitudes About Organized Labor in America”.
We’ll be back next week with more of what we’re reading about worker voice, labor standards, state experimentation, and labor-market power.
Labor Innovation is edited by Richard Allen Smith.
