How AI and automation can make a job worse than before — A few months ago I wrote a post arguing that “AI and automation may not steal your job — but they’ll probably make it suck.” This is a new way I’ve recently been thinking about the age-old question of how tech affects labor. People (including me) used to worry that…

How California’s ban on non-competes saved the tech industry from eugenics. — In 1956, the Nobel prize in physics went to William Shockley, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain for their work on silicon transistors. Shockley, a Bell Labs alum, had already gone to work commercializing this invention, moving from New Jersey to Mountain View, California and founding Shockley Semiconductors, the first “silicon”…

We can spy a dismal pattern emerging in the future of work — We often worry that AI and automation will take our jobs — that software will do work so efficiently and cheaply that corporations will chuck their humans aside. That certainly can happen; bank tellers are in steep decline, to pick just one example. But the more I’ve reported on the…

Amazon delivery drivers and liberal city dwellers vote together. But for how long? — In his new book, Fulfillment, Alec MacGillis writes of an Amazon distribution center in Sparrows Point, Maryland that sits on land once occupied by a Bethlehem Steel plant. The story underscores how dramatically the U.S. economy has transformed in recent years. Instead of making things, many of our biggest companies…

‘This complaint makes clear that workers have the right to speak to issues of ethical business and the composition of management’ — Google illegally surveilled and fired employees for participating in organizing efforts last year, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) said in a complaint filed on Wednesday. The complaint alleges that the technology giant violated labor laws after spying on, interrogating, and terminating employees Laurence Berland and Kathryn Spiers, both former…

The biggest startups in modern history were built on old-fashioned worker exploitation. Time for an upgrade. — Uber is less a business than a constellation of fantasies. The same goes for Lyft. Early on, Uber and Lyft positioned themselves as “ridesharing” companies that were a key part of the buzzword-emblazoned “sharing economy.” Uber offered luxury on demand, and Lyft claimed to be a fun, environmentally friendly alternative…

A law firm webinar advised employers on how to avoid becoming a target of CODE, an organizing initiative in tech and video game industries — On July 30, the employment and labor law firm Jackson Lewis put on a one-hour webinar designed to educate employers on a new threat: a wave of union organizing in the video game and technology industries. More specifically, it promised to teach them to defend against it.