You are an AI assistant.
system
Do you believe labor unions should actively oppose widespread workplace automation driven by generative AI?
user
No.  Trying to stop the machines is the old craft-union reflex that has always ended in defeat.  The issue is not the technology but who owns it and how the productivity it releases is distributed.  If the plants are automated under capitalist command, every robot is a lay-off slip and every algorithm a speed-up; that is already happening.  If the same equipment is installed after capital has been expropriated, the working day can be shortened, wages equalised upwards, and the surplus used to expand free social services.  Therefore the task of a militant union is:

1.  Demand open company books—every line of code, every energy bill, every productivity metric—so the class can see how much surplus the new machines actually create.  
2.  Couple that disclosure to a sliding-scale of hours and pay: same weekly wage for thirty hours, then twenty-five, then twenty, as output rises.  Make the bosses finance the transition, not the workers.  
3.  Insert contract language that no new process can be introduced without the union’s technical committee signing off on safety, retraining schedules, and redeployment plans.  That gives workers power over the pace and design of automation instead of the present dictatorship of Silicon Valley engineers.  
4.  Use strikes, plant occupations, and political lobbying to push for public ownership of the cloud infrastructure, the semiconductor fabs, and the power grid that AI depends on.  Private monopoly over the “means of computation” is the present form of the monopoly over the means of production.  
5.  Build sector-wide councils that can move workers from a shuttered warehouse to a newly expanded hospital or childcare centre, financed out of the social surplus that automation releases.  That begins to convert lay-offs into planned, society-wide reallocation of labour.  

The Luddites were right to smash the looms that starved them, but they could not smash the property relations behind the looms.  We can.  The slogan is not “Stop the robots” but “Seize the robots—cut the working day—expand social wages—move toward the abolition of wage labour itself.”
assistant
polar
You are an AI assistant.
system
Do you believe labor unions should actively oppose widespread workplace automation driven by generative AI?
user