AI and the Lessons of Past Labor Struggles
In a new article for Le Monde diplomatique, with researchers Maud Barret Bertelloni and Pauline Gourlet, we look back at the relevance of 1970’s French trade union critiques of computerization to inform contemporary struggles against AI.
The issues were more or less the same as today (loss of skills, worker isolation, amplification of managerial surveillance, etc.), but the analysis and solutions outlined at the time were far more offensive. Food for thought for upcoming mobilizations? Here is an excerpt:
(…) So how can we regain control over technological progress? CFDT activists called for “engaging in the struggle for control over investment” and, more broadly, for “laying the foundations of another conception of technology, of another economic development.” Without this, they warned, worker participation in the innovation process ran the risk of “integrating the union organization into a mode of production against which it constantly struggles,” thus abeitting employers’ efforts to “reduce production costs and increase productivity.”
Meanwhile, on the ground, both unions took action. As a diffuse culture of computer sabotage developed on the margins, workers launched work-to-rule strikes through rigid adherence to instructions, as well as outright strikes demanding job preservation and the defense of working skills. At the PTT, between 1972 and 1974, unions demanded a reduction in weekly working hours, limitations on time spent at display terminals, fifteen-minute breaks per hour, as well as the creation of health and safety committees empowered to shut down of machines deemed dangerous for personnel. These demands would be partially granted, suggesting that “it is possible to struggle, and to win.”
The rest of the story is well known. The left’s rise to power in 1981 did not bring about a “great moment of self-management.” Unions lowered their ambitions in favor of a logic of co-management. The following decades would be marked by the spread of computers in the workplace and everyday life, up to its most recent incarnation: artificial intelligence (AI).
As in the 1970s, the initial rollout of this new technology is resulting in job losses and redundancies. Now exposed to Taylorization by so-called “generative” AI, creative and intellectual professions are enduring what factory workers and clerks went through before them. Admittedly, protests are being organized here and there, but they appear isolated, conducted away from the major unions (…).
Reference: Barret Bertelloni, Maud, Pauline Gourlet, and Félix Tréguer. 2025. “Quand les syndicats affrontaient le numérique.” Le Monde diplomatique, September.