Ken S. | Red Phoenix correspondent | New Jersey–
Teamsters’ General President Sean O’Brien and North America’s Building Trades Unions’ President Sean McGarvey recently attended an infrastructure summit hosted by multinational investment company BlackRock. The summit’s guiding theme was “Building America’s Future Together: The Infrastructure Opportunity.” For two unions, with over 4.4 million members combined, it is unconscionable that their Presidents would observe, let alone participate in, any event hosted by a company of Blackrock’s ilk. BlackRock is actively privatizing homes that were once relatively affordable while workers struggle to afford housing. The company secured uncontested contracts for failing banks during the 2008 housing collapse and crushed the workforce with layoffs and uncertainty.
BlackRock is not just your run of the mill corporation; in a world of capitalist tyranny and monopolistic dominion, BlackRock is second to none. They are the world’s largest asset manager with approximately $12.5 trillion in managed capital. Along with Vanguard and State Street, these “big three” companies are holding around half of the total market capitalization of the S&P 500 (the 500 largest companies on the stock market, representing 80% of the total US stock market value), and they are the largest shareholders in 88% of those same corporations.
But BlackRock doesn’t stop at managing assets, they are also actively privatizing hospitals and utility suppliers. The United States is already dealing with an unprecedented wealth gap (the top 1% own half of the stock market, while the bottom 50% of the population owns 1%) and it’s due, in large part, to companies like BlackRock. This follows the logic of capital accumulation as Vladimir Lenin explained in Imperialism, the Highest Form of Capitalism:
“Competition becomes transformed into monopoly. The result is immense progress in the socialization of production. In particular, the process of technical invention and improvement becomes socialized.”
And later,
“Production becomes social, but appropriation remains private. The social means of production remain the private property of a few. The general framework of formally recognized free competition remains, and the yoke of a few monopolists on the rest of the population becomes a hundred times heavier, more burdensome and intolerable.”
The idea that two major labor union leaders would attend an infrastructure summit hosted by BlackRock is a betrayal to the workers they represent. Unions exist because the workforce and corporations have diametrically opposing views on production, compensation, and what is best for the workforce in general. A union should look at this summit with the understanding that this work can not be done without us, the laboring masses.
These are the same companies and capitalist opportunists who have moved American manufacturing overseas amidst rapacious automation, ignored infrastructure for decades, and still continue to pillage the countries subjected to imperialism. Instead of participating in this façade, union leaders must continue to recruit more members until organized workers’ power has been accumulated to such a level that industry-wide strikes can be successfully coordinated. They must lead the struggle for organizing society to the tune of workers’ interests, not the interests of private profit. To join in the discussion at this summit is akin to holding out your soup bowl and hoping the ladler is feeling kind. These presidents need to foment the change in American labor, not ride the coattails of the bourgeoisie.
The unions show their subservience to the people they are supposed to be fighting by their participation in a program to “maintain the country’s leadership in AI deployment.” These unions need to understand that AI will not only make millions of jobs obsolete, but the remaining jobs will be negatively affected when unemployment numbers skyrocket and companies take advantage of the swelling desperation in labor.
If not for the class antagonisms of capitalism, artificial intelligence would be a useful development for reducing workload and working hours for laborers to improve standards of living for everyone. But AI, as it is currently constituted under capitalism, instead leads to growing economic inequality, media manipulation, mental atrophy, nonconsensual imagery, stricter surveillance, and irreversible environmental issues. Competition between employers is a race to the bottom in terms of workplace conditions and workers’ quality of life.
We already see today that the data centers used for AI are raising residential utility prices as the costs to maintain them are subsidized by our tax dollars. These data centers also need immense amounts of water to cool the equipment, causing water scarcity and even droughts in more water-scarce locations. They are not being built in affluent, well-off neighborhoods, they are being built in working-class towns and cities, affecting already skyrocketing energy bills, and in some cases contributing to noise pollution with their constant, dissonant humming.
Of course, technology should be used to make the human experience a more enjoyable one. AI could have very large benefits to working people but under capitalism, every technological development is used to further oppress working people.
As with all capitalist companies, BlackRock is the ultimate contrarian. They claim to use investment principles that emphasize environmental issues, social issues, and corporate governance. Meanwhile BlackRock is the world’s largest investor in coal, they invest in industrial development and intimidation on indigenous land, and they profiteer from wars all around the globe.
For any member of either of these two unions, with such corporate stooges leading the way, every justification exists to hold their union’s leadership in the utmost contempt.
Sean O’Brien and Sean McGarvey are frauds of the highest order. They have sit-down meals with Senators paid by union dues, they play rounds of golf with the dregs of capitalist society, and they collaborate with Donald Trump, a fascist war criminal and sexual predator. They have no interest in organizing the masses, no interest in building class consciousness, and are everything that’s wrong with the current leadership of American unions.