Engineering the End of Work

“Demolition begins on Labor Temple in downtown Peoria.” The Peoria Journal Star, Mar. 31, 2025  ( The Peoria Journal Star)

Several weeks ago, demolition began on the Labor Temple in Peoria, Illinois. The images are darkly poetic: a Caterpillar excavator tears down the AFL-CIO Labor Temple three decades after the company broke the back of its labor union once and for all. In the ensuing years, Caterpillar moved thousands of jobs away from the region and ultimately relocated its historic world headquarters to Texas. The demolition will make space to expand the nearby men’s shelter. One can assume that the beds will be filled with people looking for work.

“Demolition begins on Labor Temple in downtown Peoria.” The Peoria Journal Star, Mar. 31, 2025 ( The Peoria Journal Star)

The folks most heavily invested in tools like ChatGPT and other Large Language Models (LLMs) like this scenario. Bill Gates predicts that “AI will replace humans for most things,” which is okay because “we weren’t born to do jobs.” Just as automation helped gut labor in the 1980s and hollowed out Rust Belt cities like Peoria, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is proudly pursuing a 21st century equivalent. He plans to introduce AIs that can do the job of a “mid-level engineer” this year which coincides with an announced 5% cut in the Facebook workforce.It must be noted that both men financially benefit from AI speculation in the short term and will suffer no consequence if their predictions fail to materialize in the long term.

It doesn’t matter whether or not these prognostications are accurate, it’s the bleakly detached way that these men are pitching this outcome as the happy path. The logical end is that we no longer work and live our lives All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace (1967) in the cybernetic utopia. But those in Silicon Valley have already sold that vision many years ago. And the reality they created is one where my wife on WhatsApp/Android cannot send my parents on iMessage/iPhone a message over an open, publicly-built (and funded) protocol. It’s a reality where the objective productivity gains that these tools have provided have lead to the same (or more) working hours and stagnant wages. Why should we believe that these people won’t simply capture more power with more powerful technology? Which is the more likely outcome: cybernetic utopia or more of the same?

Labor unions were once a way to push back on this power. But they seem to have fallen victim to a version of Clayton Christensen’s Disruptive Innovation Theory: even unions that recognized the twin threat of a globalized workforce and automation could do nothing about it. Take, for example, Tom Juravich’s song VDT (1989) about someone working a Video Display Terminal (a 1980s computer terminal) where he sings, “If you ever spent hours behind a VDT, you’d know that no one needs a union more than me.”Juravich also predicts the now ubiquitous Bossware, “And the boss couldn’t test my productivity, punching up my number on his VDT.” See more on Classic Labor Songs from Smithsonian Folkways. Data entry was very difficult to automate but very easy to offshore. Today’s LLMs were enhanced by the work of people making ~$1 an hour in Kenya by slogging through and labeling the most vile textual content imaginable so you don’t have to. It’s a decades-old pattern common in Silicon Valley: before we automate, we offshore.The use of cheap labor to “automate” goes back to the beginning of digital computing. Data processing was once a “computing division” at a company where large numbers of people (usually women) were “computers” with adding machines. They were replaced by computers like the UNIVAC. Then Data input was once simply a large number of people (again, usually women) punching cards and entering data into computers. They were replaced by scannable codes.

Engineering Solidarity

Until recently, white collar labor wasn’t subject to the same pressures of blue collar labor.20th century “solidarity” is unfortunately bounded by class experience and otherness. Blue collar workers built and maintained complex physical systems while white collar jobs focused on the management of abstract systems. This is sometimes oddly called “knowledge work.” Building software can be a little bit of both. Some experience it as punching through assigned tickets and gluing off-the-shelf parts together. Others have a high degree of autonomy and work creatively. In either case, programming has been resistant to unionization. The exceptions are largely one-off efforts like the Mapbox Union. The leadership of Mapbox, a software company providing custom maps, stymied the union effortThe final union vote by the Mapbox employees: 81 votes in favor, 123 against. Those 81 votes were far fewer than the 148 that had signed the original public vision statement when the campaign started. by leaning into Silicon Valley tropes - the union would “make it harder for us to innovate” and claiming that “the campaign had caused the company to lose a round of funding.”

Most people with the title of “engineer” have been resistant to unions. Take the example of my grandfather, a Caterpillar engineer. He saw the bitter union fights of the 1990s in Peoria as a dangerous game that jeopardized the entire city, which he loved. In his own words:

I’m anxiously awaiting something positive for workers and company to come out of the Cat/UAW [United Auto Workers] dispute. I’m weary of the senseless antagonistic and warlike attitude of the union. Continuing that attitude can only be destructive for all concerned. Obviously, it is a power play by the international union and not a case of company abuse of the workers.

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Keeping Caterpillar in Peoria and local workers in jobs is surely a community concern, and local workers should have the most to say about their working careers and their future in the community.

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It is time for the international to cut some slack for the local union in order to provide a positive approach. If the international won’t cooperate, perhaps it’s time to form an independent local union that can work in a positive manner for the benefit of the workers and the company.

~ Al Schmudde, “Letters to the Editor,” The Peoria Journal Star, June 4, 1994.My grandfather was actually pointing a tension both sides had with the international union. Caterpillar had its problems with the UAW, but so did the local Peoria worker. “In 1994, following the victimizations of dozens of workers, the UAW was forced to sanction another official strike by more than 10,000 Caterpillar workers, still working without a contract since 1991. This time the walkout lasted for a record 17 months. Caterpillar responded by mobilizing management strikebreakers to maintain production. For its part, the UAW isolated the Caterpillar workers again, refusing to mobilize support from workers at Deere, Case, or at the plants of the Detroit automakers. As a consequence, the strike steadily weakened, with thousands of strikers disgusted with the treachery of the UAW returning to work. Many strikers lost their homes, cars and life savings. Marriages broke up and the stress sent some to early graves. The UAW again called off the strike, despite an overwhelming vote by Caterpillar workers to reject management’s concession demands.” ~ Class Struggle at Caterpillar: Lessons From the Past

Knowledge Luddites

It’s tempting to draw the lines of alignment based on the type of work: so-called knowledge work vs. physical labor. My grandfather was an engineer at a time when the majority of engineers ended up in managementDavid F. Noble’s “America By Design” (1977) and a more technical approach to managing was becoming more popular.The effects are even more mainstream today. Jira boards and Gnatt charts come directly from this approach. But this is not a “natural” dividing line. Teachers are knowledge workers by any definition and yet they have historically struggled to earn a fair wage.Hence the high rate of teacher unionism in the United States. Engineers might be the builders of the civilization, but teachers are the ones who ensure that civilization continues from one generation to the next. LLMs promise to situate engineers in the exact same position. Not because they are guaranteed to replace 100% of the work, but because they cut off the engineer’s path to management.Tech critic Ed Zitron’s central argument is that this has already happened in Silicon Valley. Whatever humane value existed, it has been eliminated as the upper management started to fill with metric-driven bean counters rather than creative product and engineer types.

I have been employed to build software. I have been employed to teach. I have seen what happens when work becomes devalued. It isn’t a matter of retraining. In my lifetime, we have witnessed the incredible gains in worker productivity matched by a flat lining of worker pay for the same or more hours. Literally no one has claimed that LLMs will help improve this situation. Rather, the effort from the folks with the most power have focused ideas like Universal Basic Income, which could be a panacea or just another men’s shelter with a fancier name.

In decades past, the working class basically had twoActually three, but I’ll intentionally omit violence against those who hold the capital. responses to their exploitation: sabotage the tools of automation that inevitably consolidates the additional wealth upwards or work collectively to influence the flow of capital. In the interest of brevity, I will only focus on the latter - what does working / creating / building in solidarity look like in the 21st century?

I was part of a labor fight as a part-time professor at the Illinois Institute of Art in Chicago while running my own small business. The dismal pay for part-time professors in higher education is well documented - a fact totally incongruent with the extremely high tuition in the United States. But this union effort was led by the full-time faculty who intentionally organized along side of the part-time faculty. Their grievances centered more on administrative issues than pay - resembling the Mapbox union effort in that respect.Faculty members were frustrated by a perceived lack of support and effective marketing, misrepresentation of students’ prospects, detrimental cost-cutting measures, repeated setbacks in negotiations due to frequent leadership changes, and efforts to replace full-time faculty with less qualified, cheaper instructors. These grievances and others fostered a lack of trust in management and led faculty to see unionization as the only viable path forward.

The school brought in anti-union consultants who operated just within the bounds of labor law, aiming to fracture solidarity by urging full-time faculty to form a separate union and exclude part-timers, claiming their interests were misaligned. The organizers saw through this divide-and-conquer tactic, knowing that a second vote would never come and that excluding part-time faculty would leave a pool of scabs in the event of a strike.

While the organizers understood this, they were not able to communicate it to the other teachers. Talking to the faculty, I began to hear more doubts and reticence. As the consultants would opine - unions are a lot of work and not every one was up for it.The Mapbox Union experience was similar to ours at the Art Institute in size, the initial enthusiasm, the corporate response, and the ultimate outcome. In organizer Josh Erb’s own words, “81 votes in favor [of the Mapbox Union], 123 against. When we initially went public with the campaign, 148 of us had signed our names to the vision statement we sent to leadership asking for union recognition. The final result was crushing, but not unexpected. The anti-campaign had effectively eroded our trust in one another.” The administration lost the battle to prevent the vote but ultimately won the decision.The Federal National Labor Relations Board reported the tallied vote on May 15, 2008. Out of 211 eligible voters, 202 votes were cast: 44 votes for the labor union and 158 against.

Both the union efforts at Mapbox and The Illinois Institute of Art were spurred by disagreements between the people doing the work and those who mange them. Organizing a union in an era of job mobility is a strange thing: one must care enough about the work they do and the company they work for to dedicate years of their individual life to the collective effort.

Any collective effort ebbs and flows like waves in the ocean; the Labor Temple in downtown Peoria was intended to provide a solid foundation and embody the grand aspiration that work is more than doing your job.

DIWO

Some may think the monument and the movement is antiquated in the internet age. After all, the internet was conceived, in part, as a tool to collaborate in a information society. But what we ended up building was a shopping mall with algorithmic intermediaries explicitly designed to meet so-called “Key Performance Indicators” (KPIs) to maximize shareholder value.I watched first-hand how a Chicago collective action startup called “The Point” pivoted to a coupon site called “Groupon,” to become the fastest growing business in history. It is just one example of a pivot from the town square to the shopping mall.
Image: Groupon CEO Andrew Mason on the cover of Forbes ( Forbes Magazine)

LLMs are the next intermediary. This time the shareholder value is even more apparent, hence the wild speculative money thrown at this technology. The stated promise is to further reduce the wave to its individual droplets of water.

What does it mean to resist the future they are offering? First, we must creatively misuse the technology“Misuse” of technology has a long history in the arts and hacking. But national security wonks have essentially come to the same conclusion: “We now need a coherent superintelligence strategy to navigate a new period of transformative change. We introduce the concept of Mutual Assured AI Malfunction (MAIM): a deterrence regime resembling nuclear mutual assured destruction (MAD) where any state’s aggressive bid for unilateral AI dominance is met with preventive sabotage by rivals.” itself as a form of sabotage and interrogation. Second, we must ensure that our systems of government reflect human values that resonate with ecological systems rather than subjugate them. These principles are ambivalent to the evolution of LLM technology; no one knows its true potential. But we must build forms of resistance, and build them together.

Venture Capitalist Paul Graham seemingly agrees; he implores people that building is the important “thing to do” in your life. “So what should one do? One should help people, and take care of the world. Those two are obvious. But is there anything else? When I ask that, the answer that pops up is Make good new things.” But the entire essay on What to Do focuses on the individual - not the things we do together.

Rather than DIY, the arts organization FurtherfieldFurtherfield Logo (  Furtherfield) suggested DIWO, Do It With Others, as a subversion of the DIY mentality. And the more I look at how folks with power hope to shape the world with LLMs, the more I agree with the DIWO approach:“Can Art Do Technology and Social Change?” Ruth Catlow. October 2010.

The role of the artist today has to be to push back at existing infrastructures, claim agency and share the tools with others to reclaim, shape and hack these contexts in which culture is created.

This has become a necessary strategy for conserving digital cultural artifacts that would otherwise be abandoned and rot away within years if not months. As we explored in “Fix My Code”:

But some software preservationists see a future where care is a distributed resource. It can be seen in the preservation of video games, operating systems, and activity on internet protocols. Cultural objects on the internet are our inheritance. It is up to us to maintain them.

Building and preserving our common culture - this is the fabric of our individual humanity. Just as consciousness separates us from animals, the byproducts of working in concert may separate us from LLMs. This is the legacy of labor - not only their sacrifice for eight hour workday/five days a week, safety standards, child labor laws, retirement plans, and a legal framework for collective bargaining - but the culture that they created. Removing its physical memory from our lives risks extinguishing the culture. As Mike Everett, unionist and former president of the Labor Temple Association, warned in 2009:

There are only about 60 labor temples [in the United States] left. This is really the anchor of the labor movement, and we would never really realize the value of the building until it was gone, and then it would be too late.