Unifor 2000 has selected Jane Childerhose as the winner of this year’s $1,000 Harold Dieno scholarship.
Each year, we invite members of Local 2000, as well as their children and grandchildren, to apply for the Harold Dieno Scholarship. They are asked to write a 500-word essay. A committee is formed to evaluate the essays.
This year, entrants were asked to write about:
“Artificial Intelligence has the potential to be a helpful tool for workers, but there are concerns some companies are looking at the technology as way to replace people. How should unions approach this issue and what protections for their members should they try to incorporate into future collective agreements?”
Dieno was a dedicated and active member of ITU/CWA Local 226, one of 2000’s predecessor locals, from 1954 until the early 1990s. He passed away in 2017 at age 93. He was known as an exemplary leader who was kind, wise, honest and generous.
All the essays this year were of a high quality. Any of them would have been scholarship-worthy.
Here was the winning essay:
By Jane Childerhose
As AI is introduced to the world and into the workplace, workers are faced with uncertainty around how it will impact their jobs, their salaries and their retirement. As we have been told time and time again Generative AI will be able to replace creative jobs. This is especially concerning in the area of journalism and reporting. Trust is all the media has with its readers, and that trust is held as a sacred covenant. You are trusted to report what you see, hear, feel, touch and smell. This cannot be done by a machine.
AI has no place in a newsroom. There is a push from companies to cut down on human involvement in creative positions which threatens anyone in a workplace in a creative position. Generally, as many see AI’s potential, just as many see the pitfalls. This needs to be top of mind for union and labour organizers everywhere. As the Teamsters have been fighting the move to automation and robotics replacing jobs, it is now the creative industry that is under fire from AI. Humans who are treated fairly, and compensated well do the best jobs. These are the jobs that put food on the employee’s dinner table. AI puts food on the company’s dinner table.
There needs to be consideration taken for the use of generative AI in the contracts of workers under a union. I feel the only position unions can take in labour negotiations around the use of AI, especially Local 2000 Unifor, representing Vancouver Sun and Province journalists, is to stand firm on staffing, emphasizing the need for humans. There has to be an effort to protect jobs, with a spirit of negotiation that incorporates modern challenges like re-classifying workers or jobs to protect union positions.
The speed at which AI has entered our lives is concerning. Companies need to give unions time to adapt to these ground breaking changes. Unions also need to be fighting the elimination of middle management through the monitoring of workers with technology and AI. Technology should not be allowed to lay someone off due to performance.
Unions also need to be assisted by governments. They need to tell us how they are using it and even create a registry of companies using it so everything is transparent. This relationship with government will be just as important and the relationship with employers – there needs to be clear communication and a commitment to protecting jobs.
Especially as newsrooms are already being squeezed for the importance of their work, it’s more important than ever to prove how humans are vital to the trust between people and news media. When images and even video footage become untrustworthy due to generative AI, the media needs to be centered around human workers. Those human workers must be backed by a union, because although it is difficult to predict how AI will affect our lives, it’s easy to say that the workplace of the future is protected by a union.
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