May Day in the age of AI: The new war on workers
Key takeaways
- As corporations pour billions into AI, the fight for workers’ rights is being rewritten as a fight for the right to work.
- A public holiday in many countries, May Day has traditionally been stifled in the United States, a nation that has never been big on either international labour solidarity or workers’ rights.
- The US and its tagalong to the north, Canada, instead celebrate their own exclusive Labour Day in September.
Why this matters: an international story with cross-border implications worth tracking.
As corporations pour billions into AI, the fight for workers’ rights is being rewritten as a fight for the right to work.
xwhatsapp-strokecopylinkgoogle Add Al Jazeera on Googleinfo Fear in the workplace will no doubt intensify as “AI employees” that don’t care about rights start snatching up jobs left and right, writes Belen Fernandez. [Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo/Reuters]On May 1, much of the world celebrates International Workers’ Day, or May Day, honouring workers’ rights and the history of the labour movement. A public holiday in many countries, May Day has traditionally been stifled in the United States, a nation that has never been big on either international labour solidarity or workers’ rights.
The US and its tagalong to the north, Canada, instead celebrate their own exclusive Labour Day in September. But the origins of May Day lie in the US itself, where, on the first of May in the year 1886, mass strikes on behalf of an eight-hour workday broke out and were quickly met with deadly police repression.