After the Canadian union of Postal Workers’ strike in 1975, workers won an important and relatively unprecedented gain in their new collective agreement—protections against technological change.
It had been a years-long battle. Starting in 1972, the union had been encouraging the public to boycott the then-new postal code system, because the workers managing the new automated sorting system inside warehouses were paid significantly less than previous hand-sorters.
As former CUPW leader Jean-Claude Parrot outlined in his memoir My Union, My Life, this new article provided a clear definition of technological change, required management to provide advanced notice, and protected the jobs of workers subjected to the change.
The words in the contract were not enough, though. Almost immediately after signing, management began implementing a flurry of new technological changes and ignoring the language of the agreement they had signed—even arguing before labour tribunals that they had the right to ignore it. Before long, postal workers were walking off the job in wildcat strikes across the country. Eventually, the two sides reached something of an agreement, and postal workers won a number of imperfect protections.
It was, Parrot writes, a time when policy-makers and employers were pushing technological changes harder than ever before. Initially, they sold it as a dream—technological change would allow for greater leisure time and less work. The economy would be more efficient, and all would move together into a future of common abundance. What they got instead was low-wage automated tasks and new workplace surveillance technologies like Closed Circuit Television (CCTV) in postal warehouses.
Their employers said that they were simply opposed to technological advancement, clinging to the past. They were enemies of progress—they were, in other words, Luddites.
Today, that term is generally used as a pejorative for someone who has an irrational fear of technological development, or even of the very concept of “progress,” which boosters so often use as a stand-in for technology. It’s a term that is being used more frequently these days, as tech oligarchs attempt to roll out new “artificial intelligence” systems in workplaces, communities, and institutions across the world.
The Canadian government, for its part, is “all in” on AI development, according to newly minted Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Data Innovation Evan Solomon. Despite deep and brutal cuts across public services, the 2025 federal budget dedicates over $1 billion in new funding to develop AI infrastructure over the next five years. A significant chunk of that will presumably go towards rolling out those systems within government in order to “streamline” operations and enable the promised layoffs and cash savings.
Public sector unions will, of course, oppose these measures, which will eliminate good jobs and worsen the quality of public services. For their opposition, they will likely be called Luddites—opponents of progress.
But that argument fundamentally misunderstands what the workers’ movement fights for with regard to technological development—as well as what the actual Luddites stood for.
Breaking the machines
In the early 1800s, there was a name on the lips of every mill owner in England and Wales: Ned Ludd.
Over the course of over a decade (peaking in 1811-12, when attacks were near daily), hundreds of textile mills had been subject to attacks by mobs of masked individuals who broke into mills to destroy machines in the night, sometimes clashing with local sheriffs and security forces in the process.
The people engaged in the attacks were skilled textile workers who were seeing their lives upended by the arrival of the new industrial weaving machines. Those machines helped convert their skilled and relatively well-paid work into cheap, unskilled, industrial piecework, with the low wages that came along with it.
Whenever they destroyed a mill, they signed their action under the name of their supposed leader, Ned Ludd—an imaginary figure who, legend had it, smashed two knitting frames after having been lashed with a whip by his boss for being idle. The movement of machine breakers the legend inspired called themselves Luddites.
Despite the way that the term “Luddite” is used today, those workers were not simple technophobes fighting a doomed battle against inevitable progress. “Their revolt was not against machines in themselves, but against the industrial society that threatened their established ways of life, and of which machines were the chief weapon,” writes Gavin Mueller, author of Breaking Things at Work, which frames Luddism as an enduring part of the workers’ movement.
“To say they fought against machines makes about as much sense as saying a boxer fights against fists.”
The Luddites’ actions, Mueller argues, took place in an era when the nature of work was undergoing a profound shift—from production occurring via small artisans towards the mass industrial model that still dominates today. Because the Luddites’ rebellion occurred during this transition period, workers were not yet organized as a class, and did not have the capacity to engage in modern industrial action like strikes and collective bargaining. So, rather, they engaged in coordinated acts of sabotage. They were engaged in what historian Eric Hobsbawm calls “collective bargaining by riot.”
The Luddites were one of the earliest and most explosive flashpoints where workers were explicitly organized against exploitation-increasing technologies. They were also one of the clearest, because of their near-exclusive and deliberate targeting of the machines themselves. But resistance to management technologies has been a longstanding and permanent feature of labour relations under capitalism.
Whether the early machines of industrial mass production, the technology that enabled the automation wave in the 1970s and 80s, or today’s digital “AI” technologies, workers have consistently turned technological change into a terrain of struggle, both inside and outside the workplace.
Scientific management, then and now
Organizing Foodora couriers in Toronto was no easy task. The food delivery app—similar to others like Doordash, Uber Eats, and JustEat—had workers all across Toronto, without a single worksite or any way for the workers to be in contact with one another. The company, like so many other “gig economy” operations, also classified its couriers as “independent contractors” rather than workers, which prevented them from legally forming a union under the Ontario labour code.
The couriers were “managed” by the app on their phones, rather than by a human manager. They would sign up for schedule blocks and then be assigned work based on the automated functioning of the app’s algorithm, which also included various types of productivity-scoring measures that were invisible to the workers but had major impacts on the types of jobs that they were offered.
That type of management is known as “algorithmic management,” a term that scholars initially coined to describe the labour model of Uber and Lyft before applying it to other “gig economy” operations.
At its most basic, algorithmic management refers to the automation of certain supervisory and management tasks. In the case of food courier operations, such as Foodora, that means the dispatch worker. As Callum Cant writes in Riding for Deliveroo, a memoir about organizing gig couriers at the UK-based gig courier operation, the app serves as an automated dispatcher, removing the need for that type of human labour. The app also serves as a disciplinary agent, much like a human manager does by punishing workers who work slowly and rewarding productivity. All of this is done in a way that is deliberately made to keep workers isolated from one another.
Gig economy operations typically describe themselves as technology companies, as if the “innovation” that they produce is primarily technological in nature. They present themselves as being driven by inventiveness and innovation. But they aren’t inventing new products—taxis existed before Uber, just as food delivery existed before Foodora. The primary innovation that these companies are engaged in is administrative and managerial.
Algorithmic management—of which the coming wave of workplace AI should be considered an extension—is the latest in a long line of managerial science innovations whose primary goal is to extract more value from labour. Beginning with Frederick Taylor, the American engineer credited with creating the principles of scientific management, the entire discipline of management has been primarily concerned with how to “rationalize” the labour force in order to extract the most profit from each unit of labour.
“Taylorism,” as it came to be known, went about that in two principle ways—through work intensification and de-skilling of skilled labour. Later “innovations” in management science, such as Henry Ford’s assembly line system and Toyota’s system of “lean production”, continued that process. Algorithmic management has amplified it further.
Workers, of course, have the opposite interests, which is why the technology that enables these changes often becomes such an important flashpoint in workplace struggles.
Foodora workers—backed by none other than the Canadian Union of Postal Workers—won their union drive in 2020, after an Ontario labour tribunal found that they had been illegally misclassified as independent contractors. Some of the primary animating factors in the success of the drive were a desire to have greater say over the application’s algorithmic management on issues like shift distribution. Foodora shut down its Canadian operations shortly afterwards, and had to pay a significant sum of money to the workers whose union it had busted.
Technology is built in the image of its owners
In 1971, the recently elected socialist government of Chile embarked on a new and unprecedented project: it was going to create a network of computers that could talk to one another. They were going to create the internet, or at least something like it.
Project Cybersyn, as it was called, built on the growing discipline of cybernetics. The vision, as outlined by Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski in their history of economic planning, The People’s Republic of Walmart, was to connect computers on factory floors across the country to each other and to the State Development Corporation, in order to facilitate economic planning. Chile’s president, Salvadore Allende, hoped that it could be used by worker-owned workplaces to coordinate democratizing the economy.
It all came to an end when U.S.-backed elements of the military, led by Augusto Pinochet, overthrew the government and installed a brutal military dictatorship in 1973, which enjoyed full U.S. support until its fall in 1988. Project Cybersyn was consigned to be a footnote in history.
The world certainly would look different today if Chile’s mission—to create the technology of democratic socialist economic planning—had succeeded. Instead, the field of technological advancement is dominated by capitalist firms looking to use technological advances to squeeze ever-increasing profits out of workers, consumers, and the natural world.
Technology works in the interest of its owners. Until working people hold democratic control over the development and deployment of technology, it will continue to be a force to accelerate the exploitation of workers and further the interests of bosses. It’s no surprise, then, that workers continue to be animated by the spirit of Ned Ludd.
