Pearl River      Everywhere you go, everything you read, combines to convince all of us that it’s a brave new world.  Robots and artificial intelligence are coming and companies sing a chorus of how good it’s going to be for all of us.  Listening to Local 100’s staff on our weekly roundup call made me wonder.

Sometimes the organizers talk about old style grievances for write-ups on this or that.  Reading about Trump scoffing at a new reporter who he claimed never smiled, brought back memories of the first grievance I won when we were representing food service workers at Tulane University’s student cafeterias.  One of our members, Gail Kelly, was being fired as a line server because she “didn’t smile enough.”  Gail was about the same age as the students and athletes she was serving, and smiling too much was an invitation to trouble.  We had her back to work quickly.  Her job was putting food on the trays not handling flirty students.

I digress.  That was then.  This is now.  Hearing the organizers talk about some of the worker issues and grievances made me wonder if bosses can handle even simple issues around basic tech, much less AI and all it all it portends.

In Houston, our rep had gotten a call at 9pm from one of our Head Start workers who had been with the company for thirty years.  She had gotten an email from personnel that mentioned at the bottom of a list of staff changes that she had been terminated.  It was all news to her.  She had gotten no writeups.  No one had talked to her.  She wondered if she should resign, even after all of these years, so it wouldn’t hurt her employment record.  Phone calls back and forth tried to puzzle this out, until an early morning call to HR found them apologizing that they had mashed together some excel files and didn’t doublecheck the email, so of course she wasn’t fired.  The explanation was lame, but having followed all of the Musk DOGE layoffs and firings and then rehires done by computer programs and people who were clueless, I had to wonder if ChatGPT was being used in the personnel department?

That was mild compared to the next case discussed in Arkansas involving state workers and their bosses’ knee-jerk tech assumptions and instructions.  The recent winter storm had shutdown much of the state with snow and ice blocking many state health workers from being able to get to work.  The state was sending out written writeups to 350 workers, who had not been issued state-owned computers, claiming that they did not come to work and should have used their personal computers to continue to work, despite not having state-issued hardware.  Local 100’s phones were ringing off the hook as people returned to work and started hearing about the writeup.  The union had to remind management that state mandated beneficiary privacy and confidentiality restrictions barred the use of any computers that were not part of the state network.  The first faulty assumption was that all 350 of these workers owned personal computers and/or personal computers able to handle complicated state and federal databases on recipients of various programs and services.  The second was a “forest and trees” problem, where management assumed without thinking and regardless of their own rules, regulations and mandates that in our high-tech world and workplaces that all work and all computers were fungible without thinking about either the workers they employ or the clients they serve.

The Arkansas story is less of a mystery than the grievance in Houston, but it also has a happy ending.  When the union representative finally got to the head of the department and reminded the director that the state’s own rules restricted use of personal computers for sensitive state business, not only was the writeup vacated, but the director committed to solving the problem by going to the legislature and getting the money to provide these 350 workers with computers, so they could do their jobs.

In the modern world and workplace, if public and private employers don’t realize that tech, even simple stuff like spreadsheets, email, and computers, are simply tools that require careful handling, we’re facing many worse disasters when some of them begin to believe that artificial intelligence can somehow do their jobs for them.  None of the claims for robots or AI, as labor saving and revolutionary advances, work without workers up and down the ladder still doing the thinking and controlling the tools.