Technology is the reason why the Great British Rail Strike (or many others) aren’t going to be resolved soon. It’s best to think of this dispute in the historical context of the industrial revolution.
It was Spring 2021, and the government announced an exciting new era for UK rail passengers: Great British Railways. With a name invoking the kind of patriotic spirit harking back to the steam filled days of British Rail, it promised to simplify the rail system and make travelling by train so much easier. Unfortunately for Grant Shapps, and indeed, anyone wishing to travel by train, industrial relations soured.
Furlough fuelled inflation rocketed and the contagion of workforce dissatifaction spread from Scotland to other parts of the union, where multiple railway unions would launch widespread strike action, which is ongoing in to 2023. The press would label the strikers as militant and overpaid. The tweets heralded driverless trains. The leadership of the UK opposition party (founded on the Trade Union movement) would discourage public support by their MPs. Naturally, with a government and a fourth estate fully embracing the Fourth Industrial Revolution, this is all connected to how this is a wider societal issue, that is not going to be resolved any time soon.
Aside from the obvious increasing inflation problem which is destroying wages, and is showing no signs of slowing, there is an idealogical battle at the forefront of this industrial dispute and those affecting many other sectors. It’s a societal change that is happening globally, where worker’s jobs are being replaced by technology. This is to the benefit of tech companies and businesses that enjoy increased profit margins through the robotisation of their workforce, and to the detriment of the humans whose jobs are being displaced and rights are being slashed.
Technological change has been enabled by the rise of the smartphone, where passengers can simply download an app, the proliferation of high speed mobile internet connections, and artificial intelligence. If you look at the key components of the rail dispute, they centre around things like driver only operation of trains and closing ticket offices, and mandatory adoption of new technology. This is why it seems to me that the government has no intention to settle this dispute any time soon. The major idealogical revolution which we are in the midst of whereby human’s jobs are being replaced with technology is not going away. It’s all part of a wider strategy, which we have seen more widely in the rail industry. The Rail Delivery Group recently contracted Tata Consultancy Services for 6 years to develop the Rail Data Marketplace. This $150 billion company and it’s shareholders are the type to benefit from the revolution, and it’s shareprice rose on the news of the contract. The platform will utilise Google techology, another key beneficiary of this revolution. Contract financials weren’t disclosed. We have seen artificial intelligence being utilised in the rail industry with software which can automatically detect potential maintenance issues with image recognition. Drones are being deployed and thermal imaging can detect defects.
The slashing of so many mainentance and other railway jobs is not going to benefit passengers. Just look at the daily cancellation stats on Train Beacon Twitter feed. You will find that staff shortages and other issues requiring skilled human rectification are overwhelmingly the main reasons for British train cancellations.
We often hear about driverless trains in the context of this dispute, almost used as threat towards train drivers and a hammer to hit them with. Realistically these are going to be incredibly difficult and expensive to launch widely on Great Britain’s antiquated railway network, which was never originally built with machine learning in mind. Driverless trains and the systems that support them will use articifial intellegence at their core, and they have undoubtably already replaced many train driver’s jobs worldwide.
We have seen the effects of technology in other industrial disputes too. It seems that Royal Mail is looking towards the “Uberisation” of their workforce, decimating their rights. Management want to move postal workers’ start and finish times back by an hour, to be able to cater better for customers who shop online in the evenings. A CWU rep said “We’re not prepared to stand by and watch this great public service turned into another gig economy service where they want to get rid of the current workforce and replace them with workers on 20% less money and less terms and conditions than we currently have.”
In the healthcare sector, where nurses and ambulance drivers are also set to strike before Christmas, we have seen the rise of “tele-medicine”, and the shambolic “track and trace” app founded upon bluetooth technology that was never designed to be capable of accurately measuring distances. And the NHS App being utilised as a gatekeeper for gaining a doctors appointment. UK Health Secretary Steve Barclay visited Imperial University’s Hamlyn Centre in the summer where he met researchers working on medical robotics. He later commented on the NHS: “At this stage I believe the NHS is overstating the risk of innovation compared to the risk of the status quo,” he said, saying the total “needs to be recalibrated”. “Take for example the risks of adopting machine learning alone, there can be some risk, but this should be assessed against the risk of the status quo, where there can be long delays due to staff shortages.”
I suspect that the current government, and future ones, will not look to seriously resolve these kind of disputes, but instead, to stir up division between the workforce and utilise the current strike action as a tool to implement further legislation to supress the effects of industrial action. This will take time to implement but in the context of other recent controversial UK legislation, looks inevitable.
Historically, technology has come after low skilled and low paid workers jobs first. What we are seeing as artificial intelligence improves, and it has improved enormously over the last decade, is that higher skilled – and better paid – jobs are being affected too.
Credits: Photo from Paul Boxley