There were two debates on AI, calling for Transparency, Accountability and Job Security. I briefly review the and reference the two motions, point at the TUC proposals, the French SA’s fining of Amazon, ORG’s critique of the Data Use and Access Act and cross reference other articles I have written on the coming impact of AI/LLMs.
On Tuesday afternoon, we held a short debate on Artificial Intelligence. There were two key motions, the first Motion 133 (P78), called, AI Worker Protections from Artificial Intelligence (AI): Transparency, Accountability and Job Security. This is an incredibly well written and comprehensive motion, and I recommend that if you want more, you see what they and now Congress says. It seems that it was inspired by the TUC authored Artificial Intelligence (Employment and Regulation) Bill, which may be going through Parliament today. The three headings summarise the words of the motion well, leveraging the GDPR’s right to freedom from profiling (Article 22) into a demand that algorithms are negotiated with workers and their trade unions, raising the issues of discrimination and job security. It should be noted that the freedom from profiling will often be a customer right too. The debate on M133 starts with the mover’s speech, and is followed by the seconder.
Solidarity with Amazon
There was a second debate, the union’s Amazon workers branch, brought a motion (M153, p86) to Congress on the illegal behaviour of Amazon in their warehouses and their persistent breaches of the GDPR. The motion noted that the French supervisory authority had investigated Amazon and by the time of Congress had issued a fine. This is an important advance for European workers which of course UK workers will not benefit from. The motion was merged into a composite, composite 7 (P172) , which makes mention of the TUC authored Artificial Intelligence (Employment and Regulation) Bill, where much of the shopping list comes from. Activists may also have been inspired by the EU’s AI Act.
Unfortunately, we may have missed the boat on this. Parliament has just passed the Data Use and Access Bill, which according to the Open Rights Group, significantly weakens our rights to be free of automated decision-making permitting such processing unless special data is used.
Special data is,
… personal data revealing racial or ethnic origin, political opinions, religious or philosophical beliefs, or trade union membership, and the processing of genetic data, biometric data for the purpose of uniquely identifying a natural person, data concerning health or data concerning a natural person’s sex life or sexual orientation
GDPR Article 9
I comment further on the debate on this blog, and the regulation of AI on my linkedin blog and elsewhere on this blog.
This blog article is best read with [some of], the following documents, the final agenda document, the GMB Congress page and the video index which is available as a playlist or as individual videos at the GMB’s youtube channel. This article has been back dated to about the time of occurrence.