As a union, we see that a number of tools exist to make the employee’s job easier. As I mentioned, there are negative impacts. Workers are being stripped of their autonomy and capacity for judgment. We’re turning individuals into automatons following a recipe previously determined by an algorithm.
I’ll use Bell’s Blueprint as a case in point. Communication systems installation technicians are required to enter their objective and all the steps involved in their task into the program. This is a basic step. It’s not a complex process, but workers have to explain what they want to do, and the program tells them how to do it. Workers become mere implementers.
In the job categories we represent, no one holds intellectual property on their ideas, because they’re already performing a job as an implementer. Workers are reduced to their simplest expression. They are stripped of their ability to judge, their expertise and the effect of having a great deal of experience in the sector, under the pretext that an algorithm can take anyone and have them do the same job. The impact is negative for workers. Work is becoming boring and so easy that there’s no challenge. As a result, people are leaving the company to work elsewhere. Artificial intelligence is being used as a partial solution to a labour shortage, but by making the work uninteresting, it’s causing turnover. It’s driving attrition.
It’s not so much a question of protecting workers’ ideas, but of ensuring that human beings are contributing their skills, values and knowledge to their business. Currently, we’re seeing that tools aren’t having that effect.