Laid-off from tech: AI isn't freeing workers, it's freeing up the unemployed

According to Le Figaro, which runs a report from around San Francisco, engineers, researchers and product managers laid off by the tech sector are desperately looking for work. Many feel they are paying the bill for artificial intelligence. They gather to march together, if only to keep going, while the State of California tries, still according to the paper, to cushion the blow. The headline quotes a punchy line: one wonders how these people aren't ending up on the street.

What we don't know at this stage: how many workers are affected, which companies let them go, or what exactly the public measures mentioned actually contain. Le Figaro's file, as summarised, doesn't tell us. So let's look instead at the mechanics. What follows is our reading, not an established fact.

We were long sold AI as the machine that would deliver us from toil. Lovely programme. Except that the machine, under capitalism, was not invented to free up time: it is there to produce more for less and to tighten discipline over those who remain. Who owns the tool, who pockets the gain, how work gets reorganised: those are the real questions. Shorter working time in principle, intensification and precarity in practice: we know the tune, it has merely changed arranger.

The novelty here is the clientele. These highly qualified employees, long pampered with stock options and table football, are discovering what the workers of Roubaix or Longwy have known for a century: a salary is not a patrimony, it is a precarious rent on one's own labour power. Now they are forcibly absorbed into what Marx called the reserve army of labour: that pool of unemployed whose mere existence is enough to make those in work more docile. Every engineer on the scrapheap reminds the colleague who keeps his badge that he is replaceable, and that his pay rise can be discussed some other time.

As for the state that "cushions the blow", note the verb. One cushions; one does not contest. Benefits, training, support: all of it keeps workers in working order, available for the next cycle, while the company keeps its freedom to dismiss according to the quarterly results. The shock absorber protects the road more than the car. Our hypothesis: social protection here plays the role of subcontractor to employers' flexibility, financed by taxation.

In Paris, we are not tempted to sneer. At home, we readily denounce the "assistanat" of the unemployed (a term for welfare dependency), but who hears anyone talk of welfare dependency when the digital giants lay people off counting on the community to pick up the pieces? Liberty, equality, fraternity: the march of the Californian laid-off is a rather neat way of applying the third in the absence of the other two. What remains is for it to become something other than a march of consolation: an organisation, with demands over the ownership of the machines and the sharing of the gains. On that, the report says nothing. That is no doubt the next chapter of the story.