Podcast: Mourning, Mobilizing, and New Forms of Labor Resistance

Henri Sulku: Could you describe a bit your background as I see you’ve covered labour issue for over over fifteen years by now?

Sara Jaffe: Yeah, well, like most people, I have to work for a living and I don’t like it very much. So that’s the short answer of how I got to be a labor reporter.

The slightly longer answer is that I was looking around at the world, especially in 2008 and 2009 when I was in journalism school. There didn’t seem to be very many people—in the US in particular, but kind of anywhere I could find in the languages that I could read—who were dedicated labor reporters anymore. There were a few of us at the time. There are somewhat more now; it’s come back into style a little bit to be a labor reporter.

But really, it was a case of being in the middle of this massive economic crisis and not talking about people’s experience in the workplace very often. Or, if those conversations were happening, they were being by the bosses. So that was what led me to start covering labor as a journalist.

Obviously, when you start trying to learn that, you end up reading a lot of histories, a lot of sociology, a lot of academic works, and getting to know the people who are labor scholars in various disciplines. A lot of my work has always drawn on that kind of academic research, even when I wasn’t doing it myself.

From the Ashes: Grief as a Political Emotion

I wanted to actually start from your most recent—not most recent work, but most recent book—which you published in 2024 with Bold Type Books, with the title From the Ashes: Grief and Revolution in a World on Fire. The title already tells it’s about grief, it’s about revolution, and it’s about a world on fire. It literally starts with burning American police cars in 2020, and you also address some personal life events that you were going through.

The book was obviously quite long in the making. I wanted to ask if you could explain a bit the process behind the book and also its central themes—what led you to pursue this topic?

The short answer is that my father died and it completely turned my life upside down. I was already a journalist, I was already covering work, and I was already covering social movements. Like everybody, I was living through the COVID pandemic. It just struck me that so many of these stories that I was already covering were, in fact, also stories about grief.

In some ways, I just wanted to write the book that I needed when I was going through it. I didn’t really find anything that talked about grief in both a personal and political context. That’s how I understand my life and how I understand the world—thinking about things not just in how they impact me, but how that, in turn, is part of the way the world is shaped.

It seemed really clear to me that there’s not a lot of space in capitalist society for grieving. You’re supposed to get over it and get back to work. The fact that it is very hard to do that, and yet millions of people every day are doing it anyway, seemed important.

I was thinking about this while I was writing the previous book. I started work on Work Won’t Love You Back right after my father died, so this new book was sort of percolating in my mind while I was writing something else that, in turn, had been percolating in my mind for years before that.

So, yeah, I look at grief through my own life. I also look at grief through the Black Lives Matter movement and broader struggles against state violence, through immigration, through deindustrialization, the COVID pandemic, and climate change. That is basically what the book is about in five very long chapters and a few little short snippets about my life.

From Joyful Militancy to Collective Grief

On this regard, I wanted to ask you also a question that struck me with your book. When I was growing up and became an adult and a social and political subject, I felt that there was a lot of optimism in the air. There were concepts like “joyful militancy”—the idea that you have to incorporate a kind of optimism in your daily life and in your struggles.

But now, when I look around, we see a lot of large-scale wars, even genocidal wars, and absolutely devastating climate problems. I do see a lot of genuinely sad people around me. Sometimes these concepts of joyfulness feel even inappropriate in certain situations, like something has changed.

In this regard, what do you say related to this changing social atmosphere? How does grief become a politicized emotion or a communal practice? How can it help us to face the world?

Yeah, I think, you know, I don’t want to say that people should feel any one specific thing, right? People can be joyful, people can be grieving, and people can be both at once.

The problem, I think, is often that we are sort of compelled to perform a certain emotion or another. Arlie Russell Hochschild writes about “emotional labor” as the work of managing your own emotions in order to produce a certain emotional state in someone else. This is a condition of a lot of service work, but it’s also just a condition of life on Earth.

Particularly, if we are required to put on a certain affect in order to be able to do our political work, I don’t know who that’s helping. I don’t think it’s useful to insist that we should be any one set of things.

That said, it’s less that I want to say “everybody must feel grief”. That will happen at various points in your life whether you like it or not; it’s not really a choice. But to actually just make space for it when it does happen seems really important because it’s just not easy to be joyful sometimes. Looking around at the state of the world right now, it’s very hard to be joyful.

Even simple things, like today in London where I am, it is a really beautiful but very unseasonably hot day. Even though it’s a nice morning to go outside and people are lounging around in the park, part of my brain is going, “and we’re all going to die because of climate change,” you know? That’s just true. It’s just in the air in a way that pretending it’s not feels sort of unhelpful.

More to the point, we’re being asked to pretend everything is fine all the time. What if we could just actually be really, really honest and say: “We’re not okay. Things are not okay”?

There’s a lot that needs to be transformed in order to keep this planet livable, and we’re not doing it fast enough. In fact, there are many people trying to go in the opposite direction even faster. The amount of people trying to build data centers right now is absolutely bonkers. So, I think being honest about both what we’re feeling and why seems important to me.

Yeah, absolutely. And in your book, you also assert that grieving can be a sort of creative practice. That it is not just something passive, or something that is just time taken off from something else, but it can be a necessary or creative component of imagining different ways of life.

Yeah, I don’t know that I would say creative; it is quite destructive. But the reason that the book’s title is From the Ashes is, obviously, because it’s a line from a classic lefty militant song, but also because after the sort of rupture and transformation—after the worst has happened in some ways—you can’t just go back to the way things were before. You have to learn to see things differently and to do things differently. In that space, I think there’s a lot of transformation that happens to people, again, whether we like it or not.

It’s not always good. I think a lot of the turn to the far right and fascism that we’re seeing now is also a product of grieving. So I don’t want to say that if we just grieve, everything will be magically better. But I think that the enforced denial of it means that it comes out in other ways, if that makes sense.

The World the Unions Built—and Its Collapse

I wanted to bring you now towards the theme of our month, labor, which is also one of the five central topics in your book. We run this month’s theme under the headline “The worker is dead, long live the worker,” which for us captures the sense that something has fundamentally changed, and we have to recognize that. But also, labor and organized labor is a resilient institution; the labor movement is older than many nation-states, for example.

In your book, in a quite similar way, you say that labor unions have taken a big hit. To quote you, you say that “the destruction of the unions meant the end of the whole world that the unions had built.” I wanted to ask you, where do we stand in, let’s say, 2026? What do you mean by the world that the unions had built, what happened, and where are we now?

Yeah, I’m writing specifically there about deindustrialization and, in fact, specifically about the closure of the coal mines in Britain. This is something that I imagine a lot of your readers and listeners would know—Margaret Thatcher did this on purpose to try to destroy the most powerful union in the country. It was not because Margaret Thatcher cared about the environment.

The destruction of this entire industry, which had employed millions of people at its height, destroyed towns. Entire places that had been built around the mines were hollowed out; people left because there were no jobs there anymore. The people who are still there are struggling because local services have been hollowed out as well.

The union itself had been responsible for creating a lot of the social institutions that existed in these mining towns. The miners’ welfare hall would be where you had your wedding, it would be where you had a beer after work, and it would be where you had your funeral. These were spaces maintained by the union. In a lot of places, the National Union of Mineworkers invested heavily in things like political education, but also entertainment—they might pay for the football pitch where your kids would play.

When the union goes away, when it has no more money because it’s not getting dues from the workers anymore, it becomes a shadow of its former self. It still exists, but now it mostly represents retirees. Then that entire world goes away. The social spaces that were made for the people who were going down the mines are now gone, and we don’t need them in the same way.

I like your theme “the worker is dead, long live the worker” because it is true that a certain kind of work is rapidly shrinking, even if it’s not completely gone. In its place, there are different types of work that have different conditions, and you have to think about the ways they organize us.

Doing work on your smartphone, driving for Uber, or delivering food for Deliveroo or whatever app it is, represents a very different work process than showing up every day and going down into the ground to dig up coal. That doesn’t mean it’s not work, and it doesn’t mean it’s not important work, but in order to think about it politically, you have to understand how it works. You have to understand how it works on us in order to organize workers in a way that allows them to actually build political power.

So, in some ways, the labor movement is resilient. In other ways, it’s clinging to shrinking populations of certain kinds of traditional workers, and often missing the new kinds of workers who are taking up more of the economy. These are jobs that many more people are doing now, and you can’t just organize them the way you would organize a coal mine.

AI and the “De-skilling” of Human Labor

Absolutely. And on this remark, as you have followed unions across more than one continent, not only geographically but also economically, I wanted to pursue this concept of new forms of workers. What do you see as the new forms of life for labor? What are the new frontiers of labor resistance when you look around you?

Yeah, we’re in this fascinating moment right now because we are going through a massive transition with so-called generative AI. Companies are laying off workers they don’t think they need anymore, and then realizing that they do actually still need them and hiring them back. We see automated taxis that break down, which you can conveniently set on fire, too. I was writing about that this year.

When you look at the taxi industry, it’s the perfect example and something I think about a lot. Historically, you had taxi drivers who were often highly organized, like the London Black Cab drivers who are famous worldwide. Everybody knows about the London cabbies and the rigorous test they have to take to learn the entire city of London.

Then Uber comes in, and you don’t have to learn anything because the app tells you everything. And initially, they’re not organized. But as they start getting organized, we realize the other thing the app was doing the whole time: it was learning how you drive around London. It was recording all that data from all the drivers and feeding it into systems meant to replace them with robots.

So now we get robot taxis. None of this is solving the actual problem of traffic in cities. I say this as a bus goes by outside right now. We don’t need robot taxis in London; we need more bus routes—and air conditioning on the buses because it’s really hot right now. This technology is not a solution to any real problem that regular people had. The corporate solution is that robot taxis presumably can’t organize; the point is simply to replace the workers.

If you look at this as a process of de-skilling work over time, you have gone from cab drivers who had to learn everything because there weren’t apps for it and it was a skilled industry, to an app-based system. It took time not just to learn to drive, but to know your way around the city so that if someone got in the back of your cab and said, “I need to go to Newington Green,” you knew exactly how to get there from wherever you were. That work gets de-skilled, and consequently, the wages go down. The workers who are driving for Uber tend to be immigrant workers, people who had less bargaining power in the economy anyway. Now, tech companies want to de-skill the job even more by just using a robot.

In reality, for all of these robot cars, there is probably somebody sitting in an office somewhere—possibly on the other side of the world where they can pay them even less than immigrant workers in London—watching a screen. If one of five different Waymos gets stuck, they come in and drive it remotely. These are the things happening with a lot of drone-operated systems and robot deliveries. There are still workers in the mix, but the companies are just forcing them to do more work—like having one driver monitor five cars rather than driving one, stepping in only when a vehicle gets stuck. It’s an attempt to drive down at every turn the amount of willful, messy human labor in the process.

The fun thing about the Waymos that we learned in Los Angeles during the riots around the ICE deportation raids was that you can just call them to a place, set them on fire, and then call another one and they’ll keep coming. There isn’t a human driver looking at the situation thinking, “I’m not going there.” That was a very funny exploitation of a glitch in the system.

But it also shows what labor disruption is going to look like now. It’s not going to look like all the workers in a single factory walking out and shutting down production until their demands are met. Instead, it’s going to look like the entire city becoming the site of struggle. The Italian Autonomists would call this the “social factory”—the idea that the entire social space is a space of production, whether it’s housework in the home or any number of things happening out on the street. To understand labor politics now, you have to understand it geographically, sociologically, and politically to see how thoroughly the work process has changed.

Absolutely. Earlier this month, we published an article from the healthcare system in China, which is in some respects the frontline of AI adoption in healthcare. We had nurses saying to the reporter, “Sometimes I feel like I’m helping the robot more than the robot is helping me.”

What I take from this is that AI and robots are not necessarily making labor redundant; they are just shaping what is needed from humans. In this case, humans are needed for troubleshooting, interpreting commands, and translating between the human patient and the robot. What do you make of this? Turning laborers into assistants for robots seems like a devaluation of skills, doesn’t it? What kind of trend is this driving?

Yeah. When we think about Taylorism—the original design of the assembly line—the goal was so that every worker is just doing the same small, repetitive movement over and over again. You can swap different workers in and out with relatively little training because they’ve just got to learn to do one tiny piece of the process, not build a whole car. If we’re thinking about that classic auto factory model, the whole goal of it is to de-skill workers, devalue workers, and turn you into an assistant to the machine.

This has been true across the whole course of industrial labor—increasing the volume of machines that can do the work. This is something Karl Marx wrote about, and it’s something that organizers, troublemakers, and labor movements all over the place have dealt with. I’ve already cited the Italians, so I’ll also talk about the Detroit Revolutionary Union Movement in the 1960s and 1970s in the U.S. That movement was led by Black workers who noticed that they were always the ones who got the crappiest jobs, had to work the fastest and hardest, and were thrown up against the machine in the worst ways.

Now we’re seeing this identical process happening over and over again with AI. It’s not fundamentally different just because people think, “Ooh, the AI is very smart and sophisticated.” It’s really not.

When you look at the things the Italian Autonomists wrote, what Marx wrote in the Fragment on Machines, and what the Detroit auto workers faced, the core understanding is that the point of technology under capitalism is to control labor more and more. I write in the grief book that capitalists don’t really care if they can replace us with machines, so long as they can force us to act like machines.

And so that’s what the AI is doing. The AI can’t truly replace us, which brings up my awful joke—a very American Saturday Night Live reference—that artificial intelligence is neither artificial nor intelligent, because it’s not. Generative AI is just plugging in words based on frequency. You can’t remove the human from the process, but you can get the AI to do a lot of the baseline tasks. Then you throw in a human to fact-check it at the end, or to troubleshoot the code you’re writing with Claude Code or whatever it is.

It is vital to understand that this is the exact same process those auto workers in Detroit were facing. It’s just another machine taking over part of a task to drive down the cost and value of human labor.

I wanted to ask you a bit more about this AI topic, because it’s impact on labor in the past five years, since the launch of ChatGPT, has been like absolutely wild debate. Some people say up to 90% of labor will be replaced. Some people say “well, let’s take it easy a little bit.” But there is a lot of confusion about what is its impact on labor. Now that I look at it, the latest estimates are much more conservative than earlier, but still I wanted to ask you about this: how does it look in terms of data at the moment, but also in terms of, let’s say, mentalities or working class subjectivities? Because this threat is there whether it’s real or imaginary, no

Yeah, yeah. It is important for me to say that what I’m not is an AI researcher. I have not done any detailed studies on which jobs are replaceable by AI.

I tend to think that mostly they’re overselling themselves because they need more investment dollars and more government contracts. You know, the thing that’s happening is like Google is turning its search into fully AI. Does anybody want that? Juries out, doesn’t look like it. Every poll of the public opinion—this I am following more closely—every public opinion poll about AI finds it getting less and less popular.

And if you look at the resistance to building data centers, this is a thing that again I’m really fascinated by, and again we’re talking about how does labor resistance look like now? Despite what the British government would tell you, AI data centers do not actually require a lot of workers once they’re built. They are not job creation sites, they are places to take away jobs. It doesn’t take a lot of workers in one [data center], so you’ve got a potential interesting choke point there is all I’m saying.

But the challenge that we have now, right, is: A, these things are setting the planet on fire even faster than we already were, and B, part of the reason that they hype this stuff, in addition to trying to get funding, is also to make us think it’s inevitable, right. That is, to make working people think that this is just how it’s gonna be and we either have to use it or, you know, whatever, it’s gonna come for us anyway. That we don’t have a choice—we can’t stop it, we can’t think about it, we certainly can’t regulate it or ban it or destroy it. And that’s just not true, it’s not inevitable.

These are things that are being made by a set of people who are making decisions. You know, the British government decided to throw its weight behind data center construction because these are supposed to be smart people who sold themselves as being the adults in the room, and they do not seem terribly smart to me. But you know, that’s a choice that could have been made otherwise. And it, like every juncture of this thing—like Google making a decision to ruin its search and give us just AI. That’s a choice that nobody asked for. Nobody did a poll that said, “Hey, would you like to keep Google?”

Google is a great example of it because it is like a massive public resource that people rely on for many many things every single day. I’m literally going like, “Are there even other search engines out there, right, like what?” Because Google has become so ubiquitous, and now this company can just decide to ruin it and we can’t do anything about it because it’s private.

So you know, it teaches us an important lesson about privatization of resources, and this is true of the whole history of the internet. There is a section of my book Work Won’t Love You Back where I write about the history of computer programming as a job, as a career, as an industry. And you know, the whole history of the thing is government money going to fund something, and then that thing gets privatized.

From Job Devotion to Collective Care

Let’s go a little bit more into your earlier book. You mentioned the title Work Won’t Love You Back, the subtitle reads How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone.

It tells exactly what is going on, but could you explain what are the central topics and arguments you pursue in this book which came out in 2021?

So that book is about a change in the way we work, and it’s specifically about the idea that people should love their jobs and how that became a common demand that we are expected. And like, what comes along with that demand that we should love our jobs? I’m arguing that we should understand that as a demand, not a wish. Like people didn’t wake up one day and go, “Gee, I’d really love to do wage labor for a living.” That’s not how that happened, right? And so the idea that we do this work because we need fulfillment is, you know, historically inaccurate… but it does something, right?

I’m talking about the need to understand the way that work is organized and the way that work organizes us. What does it mean to have our lives organized around this idea that we should love our jobs? What does that allow our jobs to do to us?

Well, I don’t think it does anything good, basically. So that’s, you know, that’s that book. It goes through 10 different workers in 10 different industries, profiling workers and then talking about the history of that work and how it’s changed, and then winding up each chapter with those workers organizing to improve their jobs or sometimes to escape them.

And how does that play out with our earlier discussion? Because on the other hand, we see this devaluation of labor, devaluation of skills. For me, it seems increasingly difficult to love your labor if you are just assistant to the robot. So does this mean that these are happening at the same time? That we have this kind of devalued labor, and then labor based on devotion. I’m, for example, a journalist—I believe for me this applies quite a lot, no?

Oh, yeah! I mean, here I am. I think one of the things that made that book both sort of possible—like it made it possible for me to conceive of it and also made it like a book that, you know, has gotten around the world enough that people are still asking me about it five years later—is that I caught it at a time when this was changing, when people were beginning to realize that loving your job was not improving your life.

And then again, COVID happened. I finished the first draft of that book in February 2020, and then in March we were in lockdown. And so I did a bunch of phone calls during lockdown, calling the workers that I had profiled to ask them how their work had changed, and in fact, one of them had died of COVID.

So you know, when we look at this history, you can sort of catch the moments where it’s changing, where you’re seeing it change and when the process becomes visible to people. Like, “Oh wait, maybe loving my job hasn’t gotten me anything good.”

And so then you saw things like a wave of organizing at places like Starbucks coffee, right? Big, dramatic strikes in Hollywood. A lot of healthcare strikes and organizing during and after the COVID pandemic, right. And these are the jobs that people are expected to care about?

And whether they want to do them for themselves because, you know, being a Hollywood writer is pretty cool, or whether they went into healthcare because they wanted to help other people, either way… the pressure is becoming much more obvious, right?

And I think that, as conditions are getting worse, you can’t just say, “But you love it, right?” When it just gets completely totally miserable and you might die for going to the workplace.

Yeah, and the next question is, what is the connection here? Because first we’re talking about grief, which for me at least somehow involves some component of—I don’t know if love is the correct word—but I mean, usually you’re grief over something that you have emotional relationship towards, no? So what is the connection here? How do these two topics, two social emotions, relate to each other?

Yeah, I think, you know, I was talking to somebody about this. My friend had posted this quote from another writer that was talking about like the Johnny Cash School of Obsession. You know, Johnny Cash, the country singer, had put out these like three compilation albums that were Love, God, Murder, and they were saying you can sort of scratch it and find the obsessions. And obviously I’m obsessed with work, but I am kind of also always writing about love. I’m writing a book right now about heterosexuality, so, you know, it is kind of a thing that’s happening in everything I’m writing.

And yeah, and so to think about what does it mean to live in this world that tells us we should love our jobs and not each other? What does it mean? You know, we’re seeing examples of this all over the place now, even as the far right is growing and becoming more powerful and frankly scaring the crap out of me, you’re also seeing people choosing to take care of each other everywhere, right?

And the resistance to Donald Trump’s ICE in this term, his second term of office, is one of those things where you look at it and you go like, people are just refusing to accept that we’re disposable. And they’re doing that in ways that that they are often putting themselves at risk and it’s not just sort of nice, cuddly whatever. It’s really, really militant, right?

The people are facing off with armed agents of the state in the street day in and day out at incredible risk to themselves. So I think to understand the power of those sort of human connections is to understand why the bosses and the politicians are always trying to sort of grind them out of us.

Fighting in the Social Factory

And this, I believe, brings us also to the wider, in this case, urban space. Now it’s not only question of workplace, but all the other relationships in the neighborhoods beyond workplace?

Yeah, yeah, exactly! I’m really fascinated by tenant organizing now and how they organize. Tara Raghuveer, who’s an American tenant organizer and the founder of the National Tenant Union Federation, she’s like, “You know, we are where, like, the [Congress of Industrial Organizations] CIO was in the 1930s—we’re growing really fast and we’re coming up with new tactics, and they don’t really know how to crush us yet.”

In the way that, there is a very well funded union busting industry out there, right, that has spent a lot of time figuring out how to wreck labor union drives, there is not yet—and I’m sure there will be soon—a very well funded playbook for how to crush a tenant union, you know? So it’s really fascinating to watch that happen, and, again, it is people organizing literally where they live. Yeah.

And this starts already bringing me towards kind of conclusive thoughts, because I have also moved through a lot of political organizations or social movements or NGOs or cultural spaces that are not economic per se. For example, let’s say the tenant union. But sometimes we see this devotion to what you do, you know, whether it’s labor or something else, paid like salary work or something else, we see it playing out also in this kind of spaces, you know? Like spaces that are claiming or are saying or pursuing to resist or subvert capitalist relations. What lesson can be draw from here?

Yeah, I think it’s important to not reproduce the dynamics of the capitalist world in our organizing, you know. I mentioned this in the book, Malchia Serral, who’s an incredible organizer who has also done a lot of writing about grief hosts this gathering on zoom and asked me to come speak at one of them. And they started out the event by talking about, you know—and, and Malchia’s parents were in the Black Panthers, they called themselves a panther cub, which is great—and you know, and they were saying like… who taught us that we were going to make the revolution by just working all the time, you know? That the work ethic, it’s not going to be just like applying yourself to it and throwing yourself at it is going to work. It’s got to be something else, you know. And that doesn’t mean that sometimes, you know, when you’re in a union and you are counting down to a big strike or a big vote or something like that, you sort of throw yourself at it for a while. But like, that can’t be the way we do it all the time because you will burn people out.

And I mean, the labor movement frankly has relied on this a lot like a constant churn of young, enthusiastic activists who, you know, finish school and are like, “I want to do something good in the world.” And then they become an organizer for like two years until they’re so exhausted that they quit. That’s not great for anyone. It doesn’t allow people to actually stay in the movement long enough to learn some things and then pass down the things that they’re learning.

So you know, Ellen Bravo, who is one of my labor movement aunties… Ellen was involved in nine to five, which was women office workers organizing in the 1970s. This is what the movie starring Dolly Parton is based on, is the actual experiences of these office workers. Most of them didn’t kidnap their boss, but still. And Ellen would say, “Everyone is important and no one is indispensable.” That people have to have breaks, and the movement has to understand that especially when they’re talking about women workers, they had caring responsibilities, they had children, they had parents to look after, they had other things to do other than just be in the union 24/7. And so the movement had to reflect in a way that the workplace doesn’t, in order for the movement to actually be strong and resilient. It has to take into account something other than just replicating the values of capitalist production.

The Horizons of Labor Resistance

And in all of this equation now, my main question: what is the role of the labor unions? Are they dead, or they can also become part of this equation?

They, they really need to not be dead because we still have to work and it still sucks, so right?

Like it’s really important actually to still be organizing around the workplace because the workplace still exists. They have not, in fact, figured out how to replace us all with robots—don’t believe anybody who tells you they have!—and we can still make a dent in the production process, but it’s hard, right?

I’m a member of the university and college union here in England now as I’m a graduate student and I do some teaching, and like, there are layoffs happening all over. And you know, it’s really hard to win a strike when the boss wants to fire you, right? When they want to get rid of you, then when they want to eliminate your job—not just like fire you personally, but like fire a third of your department say, or two thirds of your department, or close an entire campus—the old tactics don’t work, right?

I quote my old friend Joshua Clover who passed away last year in actually both of these books, i think. I quote Joshua probably more than anyone else, but he writes in Riot.Strike.Riot about what he calls the “affirmation trap.” And it’s just this, right?

That once the company wants to shut down the factory and move it to Mexico, Bangladesh, or China, you can’t win a strike because they want to shut it down. So you shutting it down for them is just doing what they want, and then they just fire you all and, you know, they move it to China. So we’re seeing that in academia too, right? It’s not just an industrial labor problem; whenever the boss wants to get rid of you, they’re taking away one of your strongest weapons. So we’ve got to figure out some other forms of leverage.

And look, if I had fixed this, the British university system would not be hemorrhaging jobs right now. I have not solved it. I would really like to solve it, but there are, you know, other people who’ve been thinking about this for longer than me. So the challenge is really like, where and how do we fight? Where is the leverage? Who needs to be on our side? At the universities, it’s obviously the students, right? And what are our demands and where are they coming from?

And when it comes to work—which I do not think we should love when we’re trying to save jobs—why and what for, right? Are we trying to save jobs because people need money to live? Well, that’s a problem we could solve, right? You know, sadly it requires overturning the entire capitalist mode of production, but still.

If the robots can do what everyone says they can do, I would still like one that would clean my bathroom for me. If they can do all of these things at some point, okay, then why does Elon [Musk] must get to keep all the profits, right? The generative AI was trained on, among other books, mine. All I get is a three thousand dollar check from Anthropic; that’s not enough, right? That’s my work, that’s your work, that’s tens of thousands of other people’s work that is being swallowed up and spat back out at us by these algorithms. Okay, why does Anthropic own it, right? Like Google, this should be a public resource if indeed it can do what they say it can do—which it mostly can’t.

The debates about data centers… unions really got to figure it out on that because, you know, the building trades are, are saying, “Sure, we’ll build data centers,” and everybody else is saying, “Wait a minute, right?” I would like labor to not buy into the idea that this is inevitable, but also to be thinking about like, “okay, if this technology can do some of our jobs, what of our jobs do we want to hold on to? What are the things we do think should still be done by humans, right?”

Do you want a robot nurse? I don’t. But you know, if I could get a robot to clean my bathroom, I’d be perfectly fine with that. So you know, these are big questions that I think, among others, unions should really be talking about and trying to answer because these massive social shifts are coming for us. And while they are not inevitable, if we don’t fight them, they will be.

So you are saying that we should set our aim beyond labor, not see it as an end goal in itself, but as ways of reaching whatever we need in our life, and also be open to pursue other avenues, right?

What would it look like the language during Covid of essential work, right? Who were the essential workers that had to keep working? That was actually like a really interesting moment to think about what work is essential. It wasn’t the guys on Wall Street—no one needs them—but like the people in the meatpacking plant were so essential that they died in massive numbers to keep feeding people, right?

What does it look like to take these questions seriously? If the AI guys say that they can replace all human labor with whatever, okay, then I say we can transform the world system in other ways too. We don’t have to just let Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos decide for us what’s going to be automated, what’s going to be done by robots, and who’s going to own the results.

Absolutely. Final question I had in mind: We already talked that unions already once created a world, no? This typical example of mining town, for example: education, political formation, culture, different elements. Now, let’s say that world is dead, at least in parts, transformed in other parts. What can be the world that not only unions but also social movements in larger way are creating at the moment? Like, where are the new openings, putting all this together? Which direction you see now in this specific juncture that we are living in?

Yeah, so I write a lot about the folks in Minneapolis in my more recent book. I think I write about Minneapolis in every book, but particularly in From the Ashes. And Minneapolis really showed us what it was like to resist Trump, right? To resist the intrusion of armed agents of the state into every community. And unions were a huge part of that.

The movement in Minneapolis—I write about this in the book, and I’ve written about it a bunch since—is really incredibly networked and connected in a way that a lot of others are not, where unions and community organizations, tenant unions, faith groups, and new things that just came into existence around the fight against ICE—they all work together. And they sort of organized together on the principle that “we can win more together than we win alone,” right? It’s a very basic labor movement principle, actually. And that means that even when something is not like “your fight,” you’re still in it because it’s actually a fight to make life better for everyone.

So the unions in Minnesota that represent building service workers are out there fighting ICE, in part because a lot of their members are immigrants, in part because nobody wants armed agents of the state kidnapping their neighbors, and in part because they understand that as unions they have some power, you know, they have some leverage that other people don’t.

And so applying that to making demands to the state, to straight up fighting the state—watching the way that’s worked has been really incredible to see. It’s not perfect, but they won, and they drew ICE out of Minneapolis and they have not gone back into another city in the same way; ICE has had to redo its strategy. And i think it’s really, really important to claim those wins when we’ve got them.

Absolutely. I think Minneapolis has been one of the inspiring examples of the late times, you know, combining elements of labor organizing, even general strike, with for example neighborhood organizing.Years of effort manifested in very strong way in the beginning of the year.

Yeah, it’s been really amazing to watch from a distance and to just be in touch with people who are going through it because, you know, it’s what they were training for, you know? And it’s really incredible to watch it, watch it work out and, you know, go, “Oh, yeah, we were right, this… this works.”