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FORTUNE.COM // MAY.1.19
bubble over and disrupt business.
“It’s not entirely clear to me how corpo-
rate America is going to respond or when
it’s going to have its Sputnik moment, as it
were,” says Scherer, who declined to discuss
specific companies his firm represents.
Whatever the case, everyone agrees that
innovation will eliminate some jobs while
opening the door to newer ones. The battle
is over how to cushion the impact of, say,
stores switching to using self-checkout sys-
tems instead of employing human cashiers.
In the past, workers have often orga-
nized to resist new technology and, in
some cases, even to rebel against it, as in
the 19th century when tailors in Europe
burned down factories filled with new-
fangled power looms. But these days,
union leaders are taking a more measured
approach.
“Work is not going away,” says Damon
Silvers, the director of policy and special
counsel for the AFL-CIO, the largest
union federation in the U.S. “There will be
new jobs created, and the content of exist-
ing jobs will change.”
To be sure, unions have negotiated over
technology and automation for years. (Just
look at the auto industry.) But now the
fight is increasingly over software rather than industrial robots, a
big job killer for decades.
In its contract negotiations in 2017, the National Basketball
Players Association, which represents NBA players, targeted wear-
able devices. The union was able to establish rules that prohibit
teams, in certain situations, from using player health and perfor-
mance data that they glean from fitness trackers.
Heart rate information collected during training or games
may show that a player is out of shape, for instance. Under the
rules, teams can use this data to help strategize during games.
But they can’t factor it in when negotiating individual NBA player
contracts because, as the NBA union’s deputy general counsel
David Foster explains, the information may be inaccurate.
The reality, of course, is that most U.S. workers don’t have the
bargaining power of NBA stars. Nevertheless, Marriott’s house-
keepers were able to win some protections in their recent con-
tract, which was similar to one their union negotiated last year on
behalf of Las Vegas casino workers. In addition to requiring that
Marriott give the union a heads-up about any new technology, it
guarantees job training for anyone who is displaced.
A housekeeper could become a cook, for example, and be put
to work at the same hotel or one nearby. The contract language
covers disruption from both futuristic scenarios like robots that
can clean rooms, to more present-day ones like the app that
infuriated the hotel’s housekeepers, says Anand Singh, a Unite
Here president in San Francisco.
“We don’t have all the answers,” he concedes. However, “you
can’t just count on some magical apparatus to reposition and
retrain Americans.”
The growing use
of technology in
the workplace is
impacting jobs
of all kinds. It’s
becoming a big-
ger battleground
in collective
bargaining.
SIM
ON DAW
SON
—BLOOM
BERG VIA GET T Y IM
AGES
